“Your mother?”
“Oh, she loves the money, the respect, the status. Having dinner at the governor’s mansion.” She laughed and it was the least happy sound he’d ever heard—it rang with the cracked earth and shimmering, heat-distorted air of a high summer day in Death Valley. “I hate her.”
Digesting the matter-of-fact statement, he removed the coffee cup from a hand that had acquired a new tremor. “What did she do to you, Beth?”
Her burning gaze found his. “Does it matter?”
“It matters.”
Maybe not to Sicily; he couldn’t say yet. But to him, yes, it did. One whole hell of a lot. He couldn’t say yet why that was so, either.
Beth drew her knees up under the blanket. Curling protectively in on herself. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Sicily. It really doesn’t.”
She was begging him. Please don’t make me say this. Maybe he was wrong, but he thought this was a secret that had to come out. What had that elegant, poised, cold woman done to her daughter that was so terrible?
Then it came to him. To her daughters. Plural. Rachel, too, maintained only minimal contact with her parents. Rachel, child of wealthy, educated parents, had left home at seventeen, gotten pregnant and married her rocker boyfriend. Rachel had very possibly committed suicide.
“They abused you.” No, she’d said “I hate her.” Not them. More slowly, he said, “She abused you.”
Beth sat still as marble, staring straight ahead. At her ruined television set? He didn’t think so. He didn’t think she was seeing anything here and now. It was a long time before she whispered, “Yes.”
“Tell me.”
Like any good cop, he’d learned to wall off emotions. He’d never have survived if he’d let himself grieve for every victim, hurt for every survivor, feel sadness or rage even when the emotions were called for. He’d already felt more this time than usual, in part because anything involving a lost or dead child was his Achilles’ heel. But now, a need to protect uncoiled inside him, so powerful it hardly left room to breathe. It was every bit as huge and terrible as his nightmares, and as useless. He couldn’t protect this woman from whatever she’d suffered a decade or more ago.
But maybe he could do something else for her. Maybe he could give her justice. And maybe, he thought, looking at her dry-eyed anguish, she still needed saving.
“Tell me,” he said again in a hard voice.
Her gaze swung toward him. If he’d been breathing, he quit now, when he saw her expression.
“Why?”
Instead of answering, he asked a question. “Have you ever told anyone?” Maybe she’d been in therapy; maybe she didn’t need him.
“Yes.” She bent her head so he couldn’t see her face anymore. “My father.”
“And he didn’t do anything. Didn’t believe you.”
“Or didn’t care. I don’t know.”
The need to wrap her in his arms was tearing at him, but he fought it. He was on the job. He had an obligation to stay professional. And maybe the fact that he was the police detective investigating her niece’s disappearance was the only reason she was talking to him. Maybe it was why she was admitting to something that had been eating at her for so long it had done incalculable damage.
“What? What did she do?” He sounded harsh. Couldn’t help himself.
Beth looked down at her knees. Her hair had swung forward to veil her face. She was rocking slightly now. “She…hurt me. All the time.”
So prosaic. So gut-wrenching. Mike didn’t want to hear the rest, but he needed to. “How?” he asked, and this time he kept his voice low and as gentle as he could.
* * *
HE WAS PLAYING GOOD COP/BAD cop. Beth thought semihysterically, but he had no foil, so he was taking both roles. Demanding one second, coaxing the next.
It was the coaxing that got to her.
Or maybe he only happened to be here when she unraveled. She struggled desperately to regain the control she’d learned as a little girl. How could it have failed her now, when it was so basic to her personality that she’d had to teach herself to fake emotions?
But she knew. Oh, she knew. In one short month, Sicily had bared Beth’s shame. In a weird way, she’d also given her hope. Not at first; at first there’d been only shame. Sicily was a living, breathing reminder that she’d sacrificed her sister to save herself. The first week had been nearly unbearable. Somehow, she had to meet this child’s needs while she herself…
Began to unravel. Yes, she thought, clutching her knees, I started falling apart then, one weak thread at a time.
Mike Ryan was waiting for her. She sneaked a sidelong peek to see that his steady cop’s gaze remained implacable, however kind he’d sounded. Why had she even let him in the door when she’d sworn she wouldn’t?
He’s interrogating me.
The awful thing was, she didn’t know if she wanted to resist. She had hated and feared her mother so long, she’d learned to contain the emotions. They never went away—sometimes they were all she was sure she felt. They stayed like a hot little ball in her belly. A coal that refused to go ash-gray and die. But she had never, never felt a burst of rage and hate so all-consuming, she thought she’d have attacked her mother if she’d been here. She’d have flung herself at her, screaming and clawing. She imagined her hands around her neck, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.
The hate raised her gorge, choking her. This wasn’t anything like what she’d felt this morning, when she’d decided she hated Mike Ryan. She shouldn’t have used that word, even to herself. She’d only been angry and humiliated, nothing like this. Nothing.
“Tell me.”
“When my mother was mad about something, or woke up in a bad mood or got mildly irritated, she hurt me.” Without making a conscious decision to tell him anything, Beth heard herself talking.
“She hit you.”
“Carefully,” she explained. “I never once had a bruise on my face. And sometimes…she did other things. She burned me, but not my hands.”
He jerked. Beth continued to study the weave of the throw where it draped over her knees.
“It was always so…deliberate.” Now that she’d started, she couldn’t seem to stop. Telling someone threw her back in time. Old scars ached. The scenes were so vivid in her mind, it was as if she were there, rather than sitting on her couch. No, that wasn’t true; she was telling this hard-faced cop her most terrible truth. She stole a single glance, to be sure that he believed her. His eyes seethed with rage as great as anything she’d ever felt.
Comforted, Beth ducked her head again and continued in that small, dry voice. “She broke bones. I can’t even tell you how many times I had broken bones. Sometimes only ribs, because they don’t show, you know. Then she wouldn’t have to take me to the doctor. For broken arms or collarbones, if it was too obvious we had to go to the emergency room. Different ones every time, of course. I have scars, too. Some burns, and a few cuts, and there was the time she accidentally dropped a bottle of expensive wine and since I was standing there, right in front of her, she grabbed the biggest piece of the bottle and…and slashed me.”
“Show me.”
The voice was so dark and resonant, she vibrated with it like a tuning fork. After a moment, she dropped the throw and lifted the hem of her sweater. She half turned from him, knowing what he’d see though she hardly ever looked at her body in the mirror. These were the worst scars. She’d spun that day in the kitchen and tried to run. The broken glass had raked her side and back instead of her belly. She’d fallen to her knees screaming but there was no one home to hear. Her mother had had to call 911 that time, there was so much blood. She’d been prepared with a distraught story about dropping the bottle, her daughter slipping in the spilled wine and falling.
Mike was swearing. His fing
ers touched the scars so lightly she barely felt them. She didn’t have much sensation there. But then he found one of the burn scars, and then another. She felt his breath, expelled along with furious words, against her nape. At last, his hands, astonishingly gentle, he pulled down her sweater and placed the red throw back around her, as if he were tucking in a child for the night.
But fury burned on his face. “Your father had to know.”
“He didn’t want to. He convinced himself I was clumsy, stupid, who knows. I was so afraid of her—” Beth’s voice broke, but with long practice she steadied it “—and I suppose… Well, it was all I knew. I never even tried to tell anyone else. Isn’t that pathetic? We had this housekeeper I loved when I was little, Maria, and later I wondered if she knew. She was suddenly gone when I was five or six, maybe.” Had she said something? Had she been fired because she’d noticed too much? Later housekeepers had come and gone; Beth hadn’t grown attached to any of them.
She continued, “I learned as I got older to recognize the look in my mother’s eyes and I’d hide. I had several places she never found. It’s a big house, you know. I’d stay in them for hours, until I heard Dad come home, or the housekeeper arrive, or I knew I could slip out and catch the school bus. I lived for the moment I could leave home. I promised myself I would never come back, and I didn’t. While I was in college I got summer jobs in eastern Washington, I always had someone who’d invited me home for Thanksgiving or Christmas, or I pretended they had. My parents both came to my graduation, so proud, because I was summa cum laude, you see. They basked in my achievement.”
A sound broke from his throat.
“Rachel never forgave me for leaving her behind.”
“How much younger was she…? It was four years, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. She was only fourteen when I left.”
“You were a kid yourself.” Astonishingly, he sounded as if he meant it. Was he trying to absolve her?
I will never absolve myself.
“I told myself it hadn’t been quite as bad for her. I protected her when I could.” Once again she let herself meet his eyes. She desperately wanted him to believe that she’d done this small bit for her sister. “I showed her all the places to hide. Sometimes we hid together. I would hold her and whisper stories to her. Until she got older, of course.”
He made another sound, inarticulate but adequate.
“But if I’d had the courage to tell someone, maybe Rachel never would have been hurt. Maybe she’d have gone to college, and met a man who loved her. She might not have become a drug addict or killed herself.”
“You think she killed herself.”
She plucked at the soft fibers of the throw. “I suppose I do.”
He was silent for a long time. When he finally spoke, he surprised her. “What would you have done if Rachel hadn’t named you as Sicily’s guardian?”
“I would have gone to court and asked for custody.” At that moment she remembered she was an adult now, and anger buried the childlike vulnerability. “When I was a senior in college, I compiled my medical records. It wasn’t easy, but I got the X-rays, too. I had ones taken of my torso that show that I’d suffered multiple rib fractures. I can prove a history of abuse. At the time, I didn’t even know why I was going through all the trouble, because once I was eighteen they couldn’t make me come home again. But I felt safer, knowing I had something to hold over them. I wished I’d thought of it sooner, because I could have gotten Child Protective Services to take Rachel away. I always thought, I don’t know why, that my word wouldn’t be enough.”
“Your scars would have been enough,” he said, in that deep, grim voice.
She didn’t quite believe that. Or maybe she couldn’t let herself, because then she’d know she hadn’t been powerless to help Rachel escape, as she’d often told herself she was.
“When I got the call that Rachel had disappeared and somebody had to come get Sicily, I knew that I had the weapon I needed to do for her what I hadn’t been able to do for Rachel.”
“You told me your parents would never get custody,” he said, sounding thoughtful. “That’s how you knew. You’d threaten to expose them.”
“Yes.”
“Beth…”
Something in his tone made her look at him.
“Where do you keep those medical records?”
Her eyes widened. “Here, at home.”
“Will you let me see them?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
THAT WAS A SURPRISE. SHE’D have expected him to say, “Get them.” Not ask. Not look at her with as much kindness as anger.
For a moment, panic climbed in her. She’d showed him her scarred flesh, hadn’t she? So why did the idea of opening that huge manila envelope for him seem worse? As if she were going to completely strip herself for him?
But she’d come this far, and finally she nodded. She set the blanket aside and went to her bedroom. The bulging packet of records stayed flat in the bottom drawer of her dresser, where she otherwise kept out-of-season clothes.
She removed the down vest, the heavy sweaters, and took the envelope out. She turned to see him standing in the bedroom doorway.
He didn’t look embarrassed. “I wanted to see where you kept them. We searched your house. They should have been noted.”
Beth flushed with anger. “Why? You were searching for information about Sicily.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily have looked at these, beyond checking that they were your records and not hers. But their existence should have been noted.”
“The envelope is the same color as the bottom of the drawer.”
He grunted, but said nothing more.
Once in the living room, she handed him the envelope. He immediately sat down, raised the flap and pulled the whole pile out. He sat quietly, head bent, reading hasty doctor’s notations. One by one, he took X-rays from their individual envelopes and held them up to the light, then carefully replaced them. He didn’t say a word for more than twenty minutes. Then he gathered everything up, put it all in the envelope and looked at her.
“They both deserve to fry.”
She flinched.
His expression became incredulous. “You can’t still love them.”
“No. Oh, no. I don’t remember ever feeling anything like that for them.” If she’d ever loved anyone, it had been Maria. She’d grieved so when a strange woman showed up to work in Maria’s place. There wasn’t even a chance to say goodbye. And then there was Rachel. I loved Rachel. Of course I did. And…that means I can love.
Sometimes she’d wondered.
“God,” he said explosively. They stared at each other. “This is inappropriate as hell,” he told her, “but I think I need to put my arms around you.”
She came close to breaking again, then, the yearning was so powerful. They both moved at the same time. He reached for her, she dove for him.
His embrace felt…amazing. His chest was so broad, his arms so strong. Her head tucked below his chin as if it were the most natural resting place she’d ever found. His breath feathered her hair, and she knew the pressure against her head meant he’d laid his cheek against it. A rumbling sound came out of his throat. He held her so tight, she felt the heavy thud of his heartbeat against her breast. She gripped him, too, and tried not to cry.
Why did she want to cry? The sensation was so alien. Until the past few days, she hadn’t cried in forever. Not even when she stood at her sister’s gravesite.
She was so muddled inside, she didn’t know what was happening to her. She wanted to cry because someone was holding her. Trying to comfort her, to give her something no one ever had. The closest she’d come was those times she and Rachel had huddled together, holding each other, whispering. She’d thought she was giving the comfort, but knew now she’d been acc
epting it, too.
In horror, she realized she was crying, that her tears were soaking into his shirt. But he only murmured, “Let it out, Beth. I don’t know how you survived. You must be so strong, but that doesn’t mean you can’t cry.”
Yes, it did. The panic returned, and she struggled backward, freeing herself from his arms. This fear wasn’t for Sicily; it was for herself. She’d survived because she didn’t let herself feel like this. It was dangerous. Too dangerous.
Beth swiped at her wet cheeks and scuttled a cushion away, to her corner of the sofa. She snatched the throw blanket and lifted it over herself as if it would keep her safe. She desperately needed to blow her nose, but she said, “I’m fine,” because if she didn’t say it, how could she believe it?
It made her mad that she was sure she had seen pity on his face.
“I’m fine,” she repeated more strongly.
He stood, went to the kitchen and came back in a minute with a paper towel, which he handed to her. She blew her nose vigorously, then wadded it in her hand and watched him warily.
He stood behind the couch frowning down at her, his blue eyes unsettlingly intense, the lines seeming to have deepened on his face, making it craggier, less handsome, more worn. And yet… And yet, she thought, and hadn’t the least idea how to define what she felt looking at him.
“I’m going to pour us some fresh coffee,” he said abruptly and disappeared again.
Once she was sure she had herself back together, Beth followed. He’d taken over the kitchen as if it were his. He’d gotten her coffeemaker going and was rummaging in the refrigerator. “You going to do something with this chicken?”
“What?”
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