by Harlan Coben
The doorbell rang again.
Kimmy looked down at her ebony legs. Thirty-five years old, never had a baby, but the varicose veins were growing like feeding worms. Too many years on her feet. Chally would want those worked on too. She was still in shape, still had a pretty great figure and terrific ass, but hey, thirty-five is not eighteen. There was some cellulite. And those veins. Like a damn relief map.
She stuck a cigarette in her mouth. The book of matches came from her current place of employment, a strip joint called the Eager Beaver. She had once been a headliner in Vegas, going by the stage name Black Magic. She did not long for those days. She did not, in truth, long for any days.
Kimmy Dale threw on a robe and opened her bedroom door. The front room had no such sun protection. The glare assaulted her. She shielded her eyes and blinked. Kimmy did not have a lot of visitors—she never tricked at home—and figured that it was probably a Jehovah’s Witness. Unlike pretty much everybody else in the free world, Kimmy did not mind their periodic intrusions. She always invited the religiously rapt into her home and listened carefully, envious that they had found something, wishing she could fall for their line of bull. As with the men in her life, she hoped that this one would be different, that this one would be able to convince her and she’d be able to buy into it.
She opened the door without asking who it was.
“Are you Kimmy Dale?”
The girl at the door was young. Eighteen, twenty, something like that. Nope, not a Jehovah’s Witness. Didn’t have that scooped-out-brain smile. For a moment Kimmy wondered if she was one of Chally’s recruits, but that wasn’t it. The girl wasn’t ugly or anything, but she wasn’t for Chally. Chally liked flash and glitter.
“Who are you?” Kimmy asked.
“That’s not important.”
“Excuse me?”
The girl lowered her eyes and bit on her lower lip. Kimmy saw something distantly familiar in the gesture and felt a small ripple in her chest.
The girl said, “You knew my mother.”
Kimmy fiddled with the cigarette. “I know lots of mothers.”
“My mother,” the girl said, “was Candace Potter.”
Kimmy winced when she said that. It was north of ninety degrees, but she suddenly tightened her robe.
“Can I come in?”
Did Kimmy say yes? She couldn’t say. She stepped to the side, and the girl pushed her way past.
Kimmy said, “I don’t understand.”
“Candace Potter was my mother. She put me up for adoption the day I was born.”
Kimmy tried to keep her bearings. She closed the trailer door. “You want something to drink?”
“No, thank you.”
The two women looked at each other. Kimmy crossed her arms.
“Not sure what you want here,” she said.
The girl spoke as if she’d been rehearsing. “Two years ago I learned that I was adopted. I love my adopted family, so I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I have two sisters and wonderful parents. They’ve been very good to me. This isn’t about them. It’s just that . . . when you find out something like this, you need to know.”
Kimmy nodded, though she wasn’t sure why.
“So I started digging for information. It wasn’t easy. But there are groups who help adopted kids find their birth parents.”
Kimmy plucked the cigarette out of her mouth. Her hand was shaking. “But you know that Candi—I mean, your mother—Candace . . .”
“. . . is dead. Yes, I know. She was murdered. I found out last week.”
Kimmy’s legs started to feel a little rubbery. She sat. Memories rushed back in and they stung.
Candace Potter. Known as “Candi Cane” in the clubs.
“What do you want from me?” Kimmy asked.
“I spoke to the officer who investigated her murder. His name is Max Darrow. Do you remember him?”
Oh, yes, she remembered good ol’ Max. Knew him even before the murder. At first Detective Max Darrow had barely gone through the motions. Talk about low priority. Dead stripper, no family. Another dying cactus on the landscape, that was all Candi was to Darrow. Kimmy had gotten involved, traded favors for favors. Way of the world.
“Yeah,” Kimmy said, “I remember him.”
“He’s retired now. Max Darrow, I mean. He says they know who killed her, but they don’t know where he is.”
Kimmy felt the tears coming to her eyes. “It was a long time ago.”
“You and my mom were friends?”
Kimmy managed to nod. She still remembered it all, of course. Candi had been more than a friend to her. In this life you don’t find too many people you can truly count on. Candi had been one—maybe the only one since Mama died when Kimmy was twelve. They had been inseparable, Kimmy and this white chick, sometimes calling themselves, professionally at least, Pic and Sayers from the old movie Brian’s Song. And then, like in the movie, the white friend died.
“Was she a prostitute?” the girl asked.
Kimmy shook her head and told a lie that felt like truth. “Never.”
“But she stripped.”
Kimmy said nothing.
“I’m not judging her.”
“What do you want then?”
“I want to know about my mother.”
“It doesn’t make any difference now.”
“It does to me.”
Kimmy remembered when she first heard the news. She’d been onstage out near Tahoe doing a slow number for the lunch crowd, the biggest group of losers in the history of mankind, men with dirt on their boots and holes in their hearts that staring at naked women only made bigger. She hadn’t seen Candi for three days running, but then again Kimmy had been on the road. Up there, on that stage, that was where she first overheard the rumors. She knew something bad had gone down. She’d just prayed it hadn’t involved Candi.
But it had.
“Your mother had a hard life,” Kimmy said.
The girl sat rapt.
“Candi thought we’d find a way out, you know? At first she figured it’d be a guy at the club. They’d find us and take us away, but that’s crap. Some of the girls try that. It never works. The guy wants some fantasy, not you. Your mother learned that pretty quick. She was a dreamer but with a purpose.”
Kimmy stopped, looked off.
“And?” the girl prompted.
“And then that bastard squashed her like she was a bug.”
The girl shifted in her chair. “Detective Darrow said his name was Clyde Rangor?”
Kimmy nodded.
“He also mentioned a woman named Emma Lemay? Wasn’t she his partner?”
“In some things, yeah. But I don’t know the details.”
Kimmy did not cry when she first heard the news. She was beyond that. But she had come forward. She risked everything, telling that damn Darrow what she knew.
Thing is, you don’t take too many stands in this life. But Kimmy would not betray Candi, even then, even when it was too late to help. Because when Candi died, so did the best parts of Kimmy.
So she talked to the cops, especially Max Darrow. Whoever did this—and yeah, she was sure it was Clyde and Emma—could hurt her or kill her, but she wouldn’t back down.
In the end, Clyde and Emma had not confronted her. They ran instead.
That was ten years ago now.
The girl asked, “Did you know about me?”
Kimmy nodded slowly. “Your mother told me—but only once. It hurt her too much to talk about it. You have to understand. Candi was young when it happened. Fifteen, sixteen years old. They took you away the moment you popped out. She never even knew if you were a boy or girl.”
The silence hung heavy. Kimmy wished that the girl would leave.
“What do you think happened to him? Clyde Rangor, I mean.”
“Probably dead,” she said, though Kimmy didn’t believe it. Cockroaches like Clyde don’t die. They just burrow back in and cause more hurt.
“I want to find him,” the girl said.
Kimmy looked up at her.
“I want to find my mother’s killer and bring him to justice. I’m not rich, but I have some money.”
They were both quiet for a moment. The air felt heavy and sticky. Kimmy wondered how to put this.
“Can I tell you something?” she began.
“Of course.”
“Your mother tried to stand up to it all.”
“Up to what?”
Kimmy pressed on. “Most of the girls, they surrender. You see? Your mother never did. She wouldn’t bend. She dreamed. But she could never win.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Are you happy, child?”
“Yes.”
“You still in school?”
“I’m starting college.”
“College,” Kimmy said in a dreamy voice. Then: “You.”
“What about me?”
“See, you’re your mother’s win.”
The girl said nothing.
“Candi—your mother—wouldn’t want you mixed up in this. Do you understand?”
“I guess I do.”
“Hold on a second.” Kimmy opened her drawer. It was there, of course. She didn’t have it out anymore, but the photograph was right on top. She and Candi smiling out at the world. Pic and Sayers. Kimmy looked at her own image and realized that the young girl they’d called Black Magic was a stranger, that Clyde Rangor might as well have pummeled her body into oblivion too.
“Take this,” she said.
The girl held the picture as if it were porcelain.
“She was beautiful,” the girl whispered.
“Very.”
“She looks happy.”
“She wasn’t. But she would be today.”
The girl put her chin up. “I don’t know if I can stay away from this.”
Then maybe, Kimmy thought, you are more like your mother than you know.
They hugged then, made promises of staying in touch. When the girl was gone, Kimmy got dressed. She drove to the florist and asked for a dozen tulips. Tulips had been Candi’s favorite. She took the four-hour trip to the graveyard and knelt by her friend’s grave. There was no one else around. Kimmy dusted off the tiny headstone. She had paid for the plot and stone herself. No potter’s grave for Candi.
“Your daughter came by today,” she said out loud.
There was a slight breeze. Kimmy closed her eyes and listened. She thought that she could hear Candi’s voice, silenced so long, beg her to keep her daughter safe.
And there, with the hot Nevada sun pounding on her skin, Kimmy promised that she would.
Chapter 2
IRVINGTON, NEW JERSEY
JUNE 20
“A CAMERA PHONE,” Matt Hunter muttered with a shake of his head.
He looked up for divine guidance, but the only thing looking back was an enormous beer bottle.
The bottle was a familiar sight, one Matt saw every time he stepped out of his sagging two-family with the shedding paint job. With its crown 185 feet in the air, the famed bottle dominated the skyline. Pabst Blue Ribbon used to have a brewery here, but they abandoned it in 1985. Years ago, the bottle had been a glorious water tower with copper-plated steel plates, glossy enamel, and a gold stopper. At night spotlights would illuminate the bottle so that Jerseyites could see it from miles around.
But no more. Now the color looked beer-bottle brown but it was really rust red. The bottle’s label was long gone. Following its lead, the once-robust neighborhood around it had not so much fallen apart as slowly disintegrated. Nobody had worked in the brewery for twenty years. From the eroding ruins, one would think it would have been much longer.
Matt stopped on the top step of their stoop. Olivia, the love of his life, did not. The car keys jangled in her hand.
“I don’t think we should,” he said.
Olivia did not break stride. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”
“A phone should be a phone,” Matt said. “A camera should be a camera.”
“Oh, that’s deep.”
“One gizmo doing both . . . it’s a perversion.”
“Your area of expertise,” Olivia said.
“Ha, ha. You don’t see the danger?”
“Er, nope.”
“A camera and a phone in one”—Matt stopped, searching for how to continue—“it’s, I don’t know, it’s interspecies breeding when you think about it, like one of those B-movie experiments that grows out of control and destroys all in its path.”
Olivia just stared at him. “You’re so weird.”
“I’m not sure we should get camera phones, that’s all.”
She hit the remote and the car doors unlocked. She reached for the door handle. Matt hesitated.
Olivia looked at him.
“What?” he asked.
“If we both had camera phones,” Olivia said, “I could send you nudies when you’re at work.”
Matt opened the door. “Verizon or Sprint?”
Olivia gave him a smile that made his chest thrum. “I love you, you know.”
“I love you too.”
They were both inside the car. She turned to him. He could see the concern and it almost made him turn away. “It’s going to be okay,” Olivia said. “You know that, right?”
He nodded and feigned a smile. Olivia wouldn’t buy it, but the effort would count toward something.
“Olivia?” he said.
“Yes?”
“Tell me more about the nudies.”
She punched his arm.
But Matt’s unease returned the moment he entered the Sprint store and started hearing about the two-year commitment. The salesman’s smile looked somehow satanic, like the devil in one of those movies where a naïve guy sells his soul. When the salesman whipped out a map of the United States—the “nonroaming” areas, he informed them, were in bright red—Matt started to back away.
As for Olivia, there was simply no quelling her excitement, but then again his wife had a natural lean toward the enthusiastic. She was one of those rare people who finds joy in things both large and small, one of those traits that demonstrates, certainly in their case, that opposites do attract.
The salesman kept jabbering. Matt tuned him out, but Olivia gave the man her full attention. She asked a question or two, just out of formality, but the salesman knew that this one was not only hooked, lined, and sinkered but fried up and halfway down the gullet.
“Let me just get the paperwork ready,” Hades said, slinking away.
Olivia gripped Matt’s arm, her face beaming. “Isn’t this fun?”
Matt made a face.
“What?”
“Did you really use the word ‘nudie’?”
She laughed and leaned her head against his shoulder.
Of course Olivia’s giddiness—and nonstop beaming—was due to much more than the changing of their mobile phone service. Purchasing the camera phones was merely a symbol, a signpost, of what was to come.
A baby.
Two days ago, Olivia had taken a home pregnancy test and, in a move Matt found oddly loaded with religious significance, a red cross finally appeared on the white stick. He was stunned silent. They had been trying to have a child for a year—pretty much since they first got married. The stress of continuous failure had turned what had always been a rather spontaneous if not downright magical experience into well-orchestrated chores of temperature taking, calendar markings, prolonged abstinence, concentrated ardor.
Now that was behind them. It was early, he warned her. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But Olivia had a glow that could not be denied. Her positive mood was a force, a storm, a tide. Matt had no chance against it.
That was why they were here.
Camera phones, Olivia had stressed, would allow the soon-to-be threesome to share family life in a way their parents’ generation could never have envisioned. Thanks to the camera phone, neither of them would miss out on their chil
d’s life-defining or even mundane moments—the first step, the first words, the average play-date, what-have-you.
That, at least, was the plan.
An hour later, when they returned to their half of the two-family home, Olivia gave him a quick kiss and started up the stairs.
“Hey,” Matt called after her, holding up his new phone and arching an eyebrow. “Want to try out the, uh, video feature?”
“The video only lasts fifteen seconds.”
“Fifteen seconds.” He considered that, shrugged, and said, “So we’ll extend foreplay.”
Olivia understandably groaned.
They lived in what most would consider a seedy area, in the strangely comforting shadow of the giant beer bottle of Irvington. When he was fresh out of prison, Matt had felt he deserved no better (which worked neatly because he could afford little better) and despite protestations from family, he began renting space nine years ago. Irvington is a tired city with a large African-American population, probably north of eighty percent. Some might reach the obvious conclusion about guilt over what he’d had to be like in prison. Matt knew that such things were never so simple, but he had no better explanation other than he couldn’t yet return to the suburbs. The change would have been too fast, the land equivalent of the bends.
Either way, this neighborhood—the Shell gas station, the old hardware store, the deli on the corner, the winos on the cracked sidewalk, the cut-throughs to Newark Airport, the tavern hidden near the old Pabst brewery—had become home.
When Olivia relocated from Virginia, he figured that she’d insist on moving to a better neighborhood. She was used to, he knew, if not better, definitely different. Olivia grew up in the small hick town of Northways, Virginia. When Olivia was a toddler, her mother ran off. Her father raised her alone.
On the elderly side for a new dad—her father was fifty-one when Olivia was born—Joshua Murray worked hard to make a home for him and his young daughter. Joshua was the town doctor of Northways—a general practitioner who worked on everything from six-year-old Mary Kate Johnson’s appendix to Old Man Riteman’s gout.
Joshua was, according to Olivia, a kind man, a gentle and wonderful father who doted on his only true relative. There was just the two of them, father and daughter, living in a brick town house off Main Street. Dad’s medical office was attached, on the right side off the driveway. Most days, Olivia would sprint home after school so that she could help out with the patients. She would cheer up scared kids or gab with Cassie, the long-time receptionist/nurse. Cassie was a “sorta nanny” too. If her father was too busy, Cassie cooked dinner and helped Olivia with her homework. For her part, Olivia worshipped her father. Her dream—and yes, she thought now that it sounded hopelessly naïve—had been to become a doctor and work with her father.