The Lost

by Vicki Pettersson

  “I’d love to,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Grif shook his head. The idea of hypnotherapy was so hokey he didn’t see how anyone could believe in it, yet not only had Kit convinced Mary Margaret to let her accompany her home, the woman had insisted she come immediately. Kit’s beloved Duetto was too small for Grif to be able to ride along and remain hidden, so he was left to hoof it in the relentless summer heat, the sun a hot griddle on his head and back. He left his hat on—his old, real one replacing the fedora Yulyia Kolyadenko had commandeered—but he’d removed his coat. Holding it over his shoulder with his right hand, he studied his cell phone’s map guidance, following the streets as Kit texted them. He was beginning to like the damned thing.

  Yet if the Pures were looking down at him now, they were surely laughing. He probably looked like a rat in a maze. He certainly felt like one as he turned the corner of yet another nondescript street. Still, that didn’t lessen the smug satisfaction he felt after reaching the street named on Kit’s final text, and catching sight of the Duetto parked in the cracking driveway of a cul-de-sac corner.

  It was a working-class neighborhood, and it appeared everyone was doing exactly that, but Grif still stole sidelong glances at the nearby houses before ducking into the shade on the home’s east side. He’d wait there for a few minutes and let the women get settled. He wasn’t sure what was needed to hypnotize someone, but if he knew dames, they’d probably fritter away a good ten minutes making small talk before getting down to business.

  Grif lit a smoke, and shook his head. Hypnotherapy. Phooey. Not that he’d gotten anywhere by more traditional means. Even if Kit failed in getting any new information from Mary Margaret, it wouldn’t hurt the case. “Because there is no case,” he muttered, blowing smoke back into the heated air.

  A bigger concern was spending time with a woman with multiple addictions. Scratch had Kit’s number now, and had already proven it wasn’t shy about showing up. Kit assured Grif she was willing to take that chance, if only because he’d be with her this time.

  Finished with his stick, Grif rubbed it out on the gravel, then slipped alongside the garage, careful to keep his shadow from crossing the front-room windows, though the shades there were drawn tight. He tested the front door and found it locked, so he waved his hand over the bolt, and entered anyway.

  The stunted foyer was more afterthought than entry, but Grif paused there, listening for signs of life. He also listened for animals, though he’d already instructed Kit to text him if a dog lurked inside. Deeming it safe, Grif followed the low murmur emanating from deeper within the house, footsteps silent on the thin brown carpeting. He needed to time his reappearance in Mary Margaret’s life, and not only to help Kit glean what information they could from the troubled woman’s memory. It was rude, he thought, to drop in like some overgrown bird—feathered and friendly, but shocking enough to send a fragile mind back into the loony bin. At least she wouldn’t actually be able to see his wings.

  A dark stain rounded to the right, indicating a high-traffic area, so Grif headed that way. Emboldened by the low exchange of voices, he peered into a living area containing pretty much what he’d expected. An old television propped atop particleboard. Mismatched coffee and side tables. A sofa draped in a dingy gray throw, and a rip that bulged with white against the dark leather.

  Drawn toward the voices—or voice; it was only Kit’s now—he continued down a hallway that branched off in three uninspired directions. A half-bath lay directly ahead, while the room he’d passed from outside sat dark on the right. The one containing Kit’s soothing, low voice was on the left. Again, peeking first, he headed that way.

  “The brooch I’ve given you is what we call a focus,” Kit was saying. “It’s from the fifties, so if you feel yourself distracted by any thought or slipping back into the present, just run your fingers over it. Give it a squeeze. You can look at it if you need to, but return to your relaxed state as quickly as possible.”

  “Okay,” Mary Margaret answered.

  “I’m going to count backward from ten, and by the time I’m finished I want you to tell me what you were doing in 1959.”

  Grif entered the room. Kit was seated on a wooden chair that had once been a part of a kitchen set, and Mary Margaret was reclined on the bed, eyes shut, brooch clasped tightly in hands that rested between her breasts. He placed a hand on Kit’s shoulder as he crossed to the center of the room, causing her to jump and glare at him, though her voice didn’t hitch as she continued her countdown. Grif didn’t dare risk making any noise by sitting in the chair by the window, or spook Mary Margaret by dropping to the side of the bed, so he just stood at the foot of it, and waited.

  “Okay, Mary Margaret,” Kit said, having finished her back count. “It is 1959 now, the month of . . .” She looked at Grif, who mouthed the answer to her. “August. How old are you, and what are you doing?”

  “I’m twelve years old,” Mary Margaret answered immediately. That was right, and Grif tilted his head, wondering if this hypnosis crap really worked. Immediately, he decided it did not. Mary Margaret wanted to be put in a trance, and Kit had openly admitted she was relying on that deep desire. Why not? Grif thought. The drugs and booze obviously hadn’t worked.

  But what the hell had happened to her, he wondered, trying to spot the twelve-year-old he’d known. Why hadn’t anyone cared for her? How could things have gotten so bad that she was surrounded by cast-off things, and worse, looked right at home among them?

  “I’m sitting in my room,” she said, as if she could see it, and it was happening right now. “It’s all white . . . sham and sheets and curtains. I have a Cissy doll, and she’s in white, too. I’d begged my father for her, but he said I was too young and I’d break her. But Uncle Sal got her for me, and even Dad didn’t cross Uncle Sal. I took good care of her. We always dressed the same, but then she got lost . . .”

  Mary Margaret’s voice trailed off, and though she didn’t open her eyes, her face scrunched up as if in pain.

  “When did she get lost?” Kit asked.

  “When I was taken.”

  Grif felt Kit look at him, but he didn’t move. Mary Margaret’s word choice unnerved him, too. Lost. Taken. All because of something in her past. Maybe their shared past.

  “Tell me about that day, Mary Margaret.”

  The hands tightened around the brooch, but Mary Margaret kept her eyes shut, and her breathing gradually steadied, still unaware that Grif was standing there.

  “It’s afternoon. Broad daylight. Safest neighborhood in the city. Safest house in the world.”

  Yes, she’d been at her uncle’s house, Sal DiMartino, the day she was taken, which made the abduction especially nervy. The niece of the city’s biggest kingpin, taken from his own front yard.

  “My mother and aunt are at their weekly ladies’ league meeting. They say they play cards afterward, but they pack flasks in their totes. Mother covers hers with her scarf and gloves.” One corner of her mouth quirked up. “Dad never asks her why she needs a scarf in the summer.”

  “And where is your uncle?” Kit pressed.

  “In his study. My brother, Tommy, and Dad are with him. They have the door shut. I know to stay away when it’s shut but I want to show Cissy to my uncle. I want him to see I’m taking care of her. She’s wearing her gloves and her pearls . . .”

  “So you enter the study?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what does your uncle do?”

  “Nothing. Uncle Sal never got angry. He smiles, and Tommy ruffles my hair, tells me my doll is real pretty, but Dad shoves me toward the door, and I stumble. He yells at Gina for letting me in.”

  “Who’s Gina?”

  “My nanny.”

  Kit looked at Grif, who nodded. The police had questioned Gina repeatedly in the days following Mary Margaret’s disappearance, but she hadn’t seen anything. Shortly after that, Gina disappeared as well.

  “She’s angry with me
, too,” Mary Margaret continued. Her voice was light now, thin as a twelve-year-old’s limbs. “She makes me go out back to play and tells me she’ll bring lemonade. But she’s sneaking my aunt’s gin while she can, and she takes too long, and I want to play on the tire swing out front, so that’s where I go. Me and Cissy. Both of us in white.”

  “So you’re alone in the front yard, on the swing,” Kit said, earning only a nod. “Then what?”

  “The car comes out of nowhere. I see him running toward me, and I try to scream but he’s too strong and fast. I’m in the backseat, and I still can’t find my voice. Why can’t I find my voice?”

  Though seated feet away, Kit reached out, as if to soothe her. The calming action threaded her words. “It’s okay, Mary Margaret. You’re telling your story right now. You do have your voice.”

  “I don’t want to be here anymore.” And this time her voice was small.

  Kit glanced at Grif, clearly wondering the same thing he was: where exactly did she mean? He circled his hand in the air, telling Kit to speed up.

  “Okay, Mary Margaret. Let’s fast-forward. Tell me about the day you were found. Tell me about the man who found you.”

  The tension left the woman’s body almost immediately, and her arms loosened. “He is stronger and faster than them all. He’s gentler, too—with me, I mean. On the day they find me, he gets to me first, even though the guns are going off and the police are screaming and the men are dying. He’s picking me up, and whispering in my ear. ‘You’re safe. You’re a good girl. That’s a good girl.’ ” She was breathing hard now. “It’s over fast, and he’s tucking my head into his arm so I can’t see. He’s so gentle, you know? Why didn’t Daddy find me? Why didn’t he come and save me?”

  It was exactly what she’d asked of Grif then. He shut his own eyes, and swallowed hard. He hadn’t known how to answer the twelve-year-old, and he didn’t know how to answer Mary Margaret now, but he was going to have to tell her something, because when he opened his eyes again, she was staring directly up at him, her own gaze wide. She surprised him not by screaming or panicking, but by saying the same thing she said when he appeared fifty years earlier.

  “Take me out of here. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

  She was so calm about it that for a moment Grif wondered if she couldn’t also somehow see his wings. After all, his job was to take the Lost souls home . . . like he’d taken her home before. But she wasn’t dead, and her vision was merely mortal, because then she said, “You look exactly the same.”

  “I know.”

  “I had a crush on you,” she added unexpectedly.

  Sure, she had. She was twelve. He’d saved her life. “I know that, too.”

  “But they killed you anyway.”

  The room fell as silent as the past.

  “Who killed him, Mary Margaret?” Kit finally said.

  But she didn’t answer. Mary Margaret was no longer in the past, yet she wasn’t fully here, either. She was in her own world, and she looked worried and unbalanced . . . yet somehow comfortable with both. “If I’d just listened to Gina, if I’d stayed in the back, then I wouldn’t have been stolen, and you wouldn’t have to find me, and then they couldn’t have said that you did those awful things.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Raped me.” The words gushed from her as if launched from her throat.

  It took a long minute before Grif could unstick his tongue. “I didn’t . . . I would never.”

  “I know. But Tommy didn’t believe me.”

  “Tommy?” Grif shook his suddenly clouded head. He thought he’d been ready for the truth, but how could any man—any decent man—be ready for this? “Your brother?”

  Mary Margaret nodded. “He came to me the night I returned. He thought I was sleeping . . . and I was at first. But he was crying, and I’d never heard my brother cry before, so that woke me up. He put his hands in my hair, and whispered in my ear. He said he had it on good word that you’d been in on it with the Salerno family, and that you’d turned on them when things went south. He said, ‘That bastard Shaw bragged about how he hurt my little sister, but now he’s going to get his, family-style.’ ”

  Grif had to work to unclench his teeth. “Who was his source, Mary Margaret?”

  “Tommy disappeared,” she said, shaking her head. “The same night you and your wife were killed. And that was my fault, too. If only I’d stayed in the backyard . . .”

  Mary Margaret’s face crumpled, and she began to cry, but Grif didn’t hear her. Tommy disappeared the same night you and your wife were killed.

  “Grif?” Kit said, breaking character, seeing him when she wasn’t supposed to. But her voice was as far off as Mary Margaret’s, and Grif heard only static. He saw a blurred shadow knocking him against a wall. He felt the searing heat of a blade splitting his belly. He felt that knife in his hand and he reacted, slashing blindly.

  “It was Tommy.” Grif’s whisper came out in a harsh rasp. Tommy DiMartino, all of twenty-two years old, nephew to Las Vegas’s biggest mobster, full of swagger and wearing driving gloves and fury in his eyes . . . he was the one who’d attacked Grif and Evie in the suite at the Marquis.

  And Grif had killed him.

  Grif glanced back at Mary Margaret, because she didn’t seem to know that. She’d said only that Tommy had disappeared. So whoever had cleaned up the mess had erased all evidence of Sal DiMartino’s nephew having died along with Evie and him.

  So who had attacked Grif from behind? Who busted the vase over his head, spilling his brains and life out on that white marble floor? Who felled Evie, too?

  Was it Sal? Had the old mobster shaken Grif’s hand and thanked him for safely returning his niece, all while planning and plotting Grif’s and Evie’s deaths?

  “Did your dad ever ask you about it?” Grif asked Mary Margaret.

  She shook her head, looking unsettlingly lucid and coherent, as if her past and present always collided in such a way. Who knew? Maybe they did. “Dad didn’t even want to think about it.”

  “And had Tommy told your uncle what I . . .” Grif licked his lips, but he couldn’t say it. Rape a child. He couldn’t even think through a thing like that. “What he said I did?”

  Mary Margaret nodded. “My uncle brought me another Cissy doll to replace the one I lost. He asked me about you. Not outright, but I knew what he was getting at. I told him you were gentle, and you saved me, and you’d never hurt me.” Wonder clouded her gaze. “You really were the only one who didn’t hurt me.”

  “Did he believe you?”

  “He wanted to. He liked you, admired you.” Her nodding stilled. “Now that I think about it, I think he was even a little jealous of you.”

  “Jealous? Why?”

  “Because you had a normal life. It was something he could never have despite all his money and connections, or probably because of them. You also had honesty and integrity. Clean hands. And that beautiful wife who looked at you like you hung the moon.”

  Grif swallowed hard, and didn’t dare look at Kit.

  “But when you and your wife and Tommy died, Uncle Sal had no choice but believe those rumors. He was sad about it for years.”

  It burned. It tore a hole right in his gut that the reputation he’d worked so hard to build had been leveled with one targeted falsehood. Someone had set him up and framed him, but he didn’t know who, or why.

  “And then what?”

  Mary Margaret gave a humorless laugh. “And then nothing. Life went on. Everyone forgot, or pretended they did. Dad stopped speaking about Tommy, but he also stopped looking at me. Then I was sent away to Catholic boarding school, and the reporters went away, too. Life went on.”

  For some, Grif thought coolly. “And Sal?”

  “I only heard him speak about it once. Thanksgiving, many years later. Isn’t that always the happiest family holiday?” She gave the same barking, dry laugh, and shook her head. “He was down, we could all see it, and he excused him
self, and his wife, the new one, not my aunt,” she clarified, as if either of them were new any longer, “she followed him, I followed them. Back to the same study. Back where I’d taken that damned doll.”

  Grif jerked his head. He didn’t have patience for her sentimentality now. “What did he say?”

  “That he missed Tommy, and missed the way things used to be. That for all the power he had, he couldn’t change the past. That he still couldn’t believe Griffin Shaw would do such a thing. Barbara told him to buck up. That it didn’t matter anymore, and that Shaw mattered even less.”

  “She didn’t like him?” Kit asked, forgetting herself again. Again, Mary Margaret didn’t notice.

  She shook her head slowly, and the intensity of the movement matched her gaze. “She hated you.”

  Grif drew back. Why the hell did this woman Barbara, whom he’d never met—or didn’t remember meeting—hate him so much?

  Mary Margaret shrugged. “You must have done something awful to her. She won’t tell me what, but it was bad enough that her hate has lasted all these years.”

  For a moment, Grif thought she was getting her past and present mixed up. He didn’t even believe in hypnosis, and he was suddenly having a hard time distinguishing the two. Thankfully, Kit was fully present. “What do you mean, all these years?”

  “Oh, she still gets plenty riled up over him.” Mary Margaret let loose another of her dark, bitter laughs, then ran a hand over her face. “But at least someone isn’t pretending they don’t remember.”

  Kit and Grif looked at each other.

  “You mean you’re still in contact with your aunt Barbara?” Kit finally said.

  “She’s the only one who came to visit after my last big breakdown. We don’t talk much, but she sends birthday and Christmas cards.” Mary Margaret sat up in bed suddenly, squinting at the brooch in her hand like she’d forgotten it was there. “She said something strange the last time I talked to her, though. It rolled around in my mind, kinda itchy-like, you know?”