Missing Pieces

by Joy Fielding

  “That’s a good girl,” Colin said. “Now, come on back here. Join your mama. Thatta girl.”

  Michelle walked slowly back to my side, pushing one foot in front of the other with great difficulty, as if she were walking through mud. I grabbed her to me, held on tight, too numb to speak, the sight of my older daughter with a knife at her throat rendering me as helpless as if I’d been bound and gagged. Where were the police? Was it possible that the patrol car had spotted Colin Friendly hiding in the bushes and was, even now, radioing for backup?

  “We thought you were dead,” Michelle said to Colin Friendly.

  He laughed. “Yeah, well, I was kind of hopin’ you’d think that.”

  A small squeal escaped Sara’s mouth. Fresh tears fell the length of her cheeks.

  “Please let her go,” I said, finding my voice, weak and cowering in a corner of my throat, pushing it out.

  “Let her go?” he asked incredulously. “Hell no. She’s one of the reasons I came back here.”

  “I’m sorry, Mommy,” Sara cried, although her lips never moved.

  Colin Friendly tightened his grip around her waist. “Isn’t that cute? The way all little girls cry for their mommy when they’re in trouble? Wendy Sabatello cried for her mommy, and Tammy Fisher, she did too. Oh, and that little girl you were so interested in, Amy Lokash, she cried for her mommy. It always gives me kind of a little thrill, you know.”

  “You’re a monster,” I whispered.

  “Yeah, well, you always knew that, didn’t you, Mommy?” he said. “Lucky for me your sister never believed you.”

  “Where is Jo Lynn?”

  “Back in Jacksonville. She didn’t feel up to making the trip back here.”

  “Is she all right?”

  He smiled. “You think I’d hurt the one woman who stood by me, who believed in me, who helped me escape?”

  “You killed Mrs. Ketchum,” I said, remembering the neighbor who’d tried to help him.

  The smile grew into a laugh. “Yeah, I did, didn’t I?”

  Sara squirmed in the killer’s arms. He pressed the knife harder against her throat, drawing a small bead of blood.

  “Oh God,” I moaned.

  “Yeah, he’s a big favorite too,” Colin said. “I hear his name a lot. God and Mommy—they run kind of neck and neck.”

  “Why are you here?” Michelle demanded. “What do you want from us?”

  “Feisty little thing, isn’t she?” Colin winked at me, grinned widely. “It’s going to be fun doing you, sweetheart. Bet I’ll be your first,” he continued, as I fought the urge to throw up. “And your last.” He laughed, clearly enjoying his power over us. He hasn’t stuttered once, I realized. “That’s why I’m here, darlin’,” he went on. “That’s what I want from you. From all of you, even Mommy here.” His voice was like a lasso, encircling us, tying us together, pulling us toward him. “I’ve been thinking of little else since I went to prison. You all been my nourishment, what’s been keeping me going. Plus, of course, I missed my goody box.”

  “Your goody box,” I repeated, wondering if the police were anywhere in the vicinity, trying to stall for time.

  “Yeah, the box where I keep all my little souvenirs: Tammy Fisher’s ankle bracelet, Marie Postelwaite’s panties, Amy Lokash’s plastic red barrette. Lots of interesting stuff. I got it buried in the backyard of my old apartment building in Lantana. Shouldn’t be too hard to find, especially with the police convinced I’m heading north.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Well, I couldn’t very well drive your sister’s fire-engine red piece of shit, now could I? So I borrowed some guy’s car. He didn’t mind. What does a dead guy need with a car anyway?” He smiled widely. “That’s the guy they found in the woods. The one they think is me. Probably because I didn’t leave him much of a face. He was nice enough to swap clothes with me before he died.”

  A soft whine filled the air as Sara slumped in Colin’s arms.

  “Don’t faint on me, girl,” he said. “Not yet.” He drew the knife up toward the underside of her chin, as if he were a barber giving a shave. A faint sound, somewhere between a gasp and a sigh, escaped Sara’s lips. “You hear that?” Colin asked. “That cute little sound? It must run in the family. Your sister made that same little sound,” he told me. “Right before I smashed her nose in.”

  “Oh God.”

  “There’s that name again.”

  “You killed my sister?” Tears filled my eyes, temporarily blinding me. I tried wiping them away, but the room remained blurred, one object bleeding into the next, like ink on a wet piece of paper. I saw Colin Friendly, his wavy dark hair disappearing into Sara’s dark roots, the whiteness of his skin merging with the whiteness of her shirt, the knife dancing unsteadily at her throat, so that it seemed as if there were many knives, many throats. The room lost focus, perspective, balance. It threatened to overturn, crumble, disappear.

  “Now, I didn’t say I killed her,” he said evenly. “I just said I broke her nose.”

  “What have you done to her?”

  “It’s funny how some people react when they know they’re going to die,” he said, ignoring my question. “Some people get all panicky, and they yell and cry and carry on. Then there are others who try to reason with you. You kind of play along with them for a while, make them think like they might be getting through to you, and they relax a little bit, get all hopeful, and then there’s that wonderful moment when they realize you’re going to kill them anyway, and you watch the hope sink in their eyes, kind of like a ship going down in the ocean. That’s usually when they start pleading.” He laughed, a kind of manic cackle that hacked at the air, like a machete. “I think I like that part the best of all.” He swayed, eyes dreamy, as if savoring the memory. “They give you all these reasons not to kill them—they want to live, they’re young and they got their whole lives ahead of them, they got their children or their widowed mothers to look after. Shit like that. Janet McMillan, she was cryin’ about her two little kids, and your friend Amy Lokash, she worried about her mother. Hey, you still want to know where to find her?” he asked suddenly, continuing before I had a chance to speak. “Remember when I sent you off on that wild-goose chase to Lake Osborne?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, it really wasn’t such a wild-goose chase after all. Amy’s there, all right. Just not in the water. I buried her beside that little building they have there for the kids’ summer camp. You must have seen it.”

  “I saw it,” I acknowledged, picturing the squat wooden cabin surrounded by trees.

  “Couple of months from now, kids’ll be dancing on her grave.”

  Once again, my eyes filled with tears—for Amy, her mother, my daughters, myself. Jo Lynn. “Did you kill my sister?” I asked.

  “If I did, she deserved it. She couldn’t do nothing right. She didn’t bring me one dime of the money she said was lyin’ around here, money I know you’ll be kind enough to provide me with before I go.”

  “Did you kill my sister?” I repeated.

  “Yeah, I did,” he said easily. “And you know, she didn’t beg or plead or try to talk me out of it or anything. She just gave that cute little sound and looked at me with those big green eyes like she’d kind of known what was going to happen all along. She wasn’t nearly as much fun to kill as you all are gonna be.” Without loosening his grip on my daughter, he managed to reach into the pocket of his pants and pull out the wedding band my sister had purchased for herself and worn with such proud defiance. “For my goody box,” he said.

  I tried to contain my growing panic, to figure out what I could do to protect my daughters from this monster. It was obvious the police weren’t going to help us. But there were three of us, I told myself, and only one of him. And even though he held a knife to my daughter’s jugular, we were only steps away from the kitchen and knives of our own. Perhaps there was some way to distract him, overtake him, surprise him before he had time to react, before he
could plunge the knife into Sara’s throat.

  And then I saw her. She first appeared in the corner of my eye, like a speck of dust, and then grew, like a shadow, assuming shape and form and three dimensions, her gray curls flat and uncombed, her nightgown falling loosely from her shoulders, her slippered feet making no sound as she crept along the tile floor behind Colin Friendly, her brown eyes clear and focused.

  “Grandma!” Michelle gasped before she could stop herself.

  “What?” Colin Friendly asked, spinning around.

  And then everything exploded.

  I didn’t actually see the golf club in my mother’s hands until it came slicing through the air at Colin Friendly’s skull. It connected with bone-shattering fury, pushing one cheekbone into the other, almost tearing the hair from his scalp, blood spilling copiously from his right ear. I lunged toward Sara, pulled her screaming from Colin Friendly’s grasp as he staggered sideways, the knife dropping from his hand as the club swooped down again, this time with even greater ferocity, slicing across his jaw, shattering his teeth, so that they flew from his mouth, like niblets of corn, blood gushing down his chin as if from a fountain. The club came down yet again, this time with hammerlike precision across the center of his face, bringing him to his knees in a pool of his own blood, his nose shattered. He looked over to where I stood huddling with my girls, and tried to laugh, although instead of sound, there was only blood. And then he fell forward at our feet.

  I ran to my mother, as the club dropped from her hands, kissed her, hugged her tightly to my chest. “I’ll protect you,” she whispered, as Michelle and Sara joined in our embrace, their bodies surrounding us, clinging to our sides like plastic wrap. “I’ll protect you.”

  By the time the police arrived, her eyes had clouded over. She greeted the officers with a polite smile, and dozed against my shoulder as I tried to tell them what happened.

  Chapter 32

  The media had a field day. For the next several weeks, we were literally besieged by hordes of reporters from around the world. TV cameras took root on our front lawn, grew like ivy around the house, scaling the windows, burrowing into every nook and cranny of the cream-colored exterior. Everywhere we went, microphones were pushed toward our mouths, strobe lights exploded in our faces, people whispered behind our backs. We issued terse “no comments” to the hundreds of questions posed. It was easier than trying to explain we didn’t have any answers.

  Even now, four months later, I have no answers. I’m still struggling to understand what happened.

  The only thing I know for certain is that my sister is dead.

  At first, I tried to deny it. I told myself that Colin Friendly was lying, that once again he’d been playing with me, enjoying my torment, and that, in reality, Jo Lynn was alive and well, that she’d sneaked away from his bed in the middle of the night, was even now hiding out in the wooded area behind the Wayfarer’s Motel near Jacksonville. Even if Colin Friendly was telling the truth, I rationalized further, Jo Lynn was a strong woman, and somehow she’d managed to survive his brutal attack. She might have to spend a few weeks in a hospital, recovering from her wounds, but she’d get better. Even after the police reported finding a woman’s body in Room 16 of the now-infamous lodging, I told myself that it wasn’t Jo Lynn. The police had been wrong about the body of the man they’d initially identified as Colin Friendly. They were wrong now, or so I tried to convince myself. Until such denials became impossible.

  I went to the medical examiner’s office, but they wouldn’t let me see her body, wouldn’t even show me a photograph. There was significant trauma to the face, the police officer explained, even though I was no longer listening, having heard it all before. Did they remember me? I wondered absently, recalling my visit with Donna Lokash, at the time never dreaming, as I glanced reluctantly at the photograph of the teenage girl lying dead on a steel slab in the back room, that one day my sister would be lying on that same slab. Or was I lying to myself about that as well? Had I somehow known all along?

  What else had I known all along? I ask myself now. Had I known, somewhere deep down in my gut, the things that happened between my stepfather and Jo Lynn all those years ago? Certainly the clues were there, all the missing pieces of the puzzle that was my sister. Looking back on it now, it seems inconceivable that I could have missed them. Jo Lynn was always dropping hints. All I had to do was bend down and pick them up. Was it possible I’d deliberately ignored them?

  Some therapist you are, Sara shouted at me, and maybe she was right. As a therapist, I should have known. Had Jo Lynn been a client, and not my sister, I would have at least suspected the truth, but, like the shoemaker’s children who go without shoes, this was simply too close to home.

  Ultimately, they identified my sister from her fingerprints, and her body was cremated. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. For a while, it felt as if she’d never existed, that there’d never been this exotic creature named Jo Lynn. And maybe this is as close to the truth as I’m likely ever to get. Because from the time my stepfather first laid his perverted hands on her, the real Jo Lynn, the Joanne Linda she was born, ceased to be. In her place grew a disturbed young woman with a penchant for high drama and low self-esteem, a woman who’d learned from childhood that to be abused meant to be loved.

  The fact was that Jo Lynn had never known safety from a man. Not from her father, not from husbands one through three, all of whom had only underlined the concepts she learned in childhood: that it was acceptable to hurt the ones you love, that dangerous men are often the most attractive, that hard fists are more persuasive than soft words. Colin Friendly was merely an extension of the men who’d preceded him. It could be argued that my sister’s marriage to Colin Friendly was as logical a move as any she’d ever made.

  Is this sufficient to explain why she would willingly throw herself at a man who would, quite literally, just as soon kill her as look at her? Was she, as the tabloids have proclaimed, that desperate for attention? For publicity? For love?

  I don’t think so. I think this is too simple an explanation for her behavior, and that somehow it misses the point.

  I think that, strange as it may seem, Colin Friendly was someone my sister thought she could control. He was in prison, after all, sentenced to die in the electric chair. Even if he managed to escape death, he would spend the rest of his life behind bars. In a subtle, but very real way, this fact rendered the vicious serial killer one of the safest men my sister had ever known.

  Or perhaps she thought she could save him, that if she loved him hard enough, believed in him strongly enough, supported him ardently enough, she would be his salvation, and that by saving him, she could somehow save herself as well.

  Could anything have saved her? Could I?

  I don’t think so, but then, that’s always been part of my problem. I think too much. What about how I feel? Isn’t that what I’m always asking my clients—how do you feel?

  Well, how do I feel?

  I feel like pulling all the dishes from the cupboards and hurling them against the tile floor, watching them smash into a million pieces. I feel like standing in the middle of the road and screaming at the top of my lungs, daring cars to hit me. I feel like running as fast as I can, as far as I can, until my legs give out and my body cries for mercy, and then screaming some more. I feel helpless. I feel angry. I feel frustrated. I feel sad. So sad. Sadness fills my lungs, like water. I feel as if I’m drowning. I’m scared. Jo Lynn has abandoned me. She was wild and reckless and just a little bit crazy. And as long as she was those things, I didn’t have to be. I could play it safe, be the good girl, the common sense to her imagination. And now she’s gone, and I feel as if a wild animal has torn a huge chunk of flesh out of my side.

  Part of me is missing.

  I never told my sister that I loved her. And she never told me.

  How could two sisters have so much insight into each other, and so little into themselves?

  I don’t have the answer. The
lady with all the answers doesn’t have any. What will my clients think?

  Actually, I don’t have any clients. I’ve decided to take some time off, maybe a year, maybe more. Reconsidering my options, I believe is the phrase most commonly used. I’ve been working since I graduated from university, and I need a break, although, to be perfectly truthful, this sabbatical is as much a result of outside forces as inner convictions. Within days of the story breaking in the papers, most of my clients called to cancel their scheduled appointments. I don’t blame them. It’s hard to entrust your life to a therapist who can’t control her own.

  Of course, my projected radio show came to naught. Robert called to say that the powers that be at the station had decided that, in light of all the recent publicity, now was probably not the best time for me to be launching such a high-profile career. He talked about the need for credibility in broadcasting, without actually saying that mine had been seriously undermined. He never said a word about what happened—what hadn’t happened—at the Breakers. He wished me all the best; I wished him the same.

  Yesterday, I was flipping through the channels on my car radio, and I caught the end of Faith Hill’s bloodless rendition of Piece of My Heart, immediately followed by a husky, and strangely familiar, voice: “We’re talking about heartache today on WKEY-FM’s Country Counselor. The call lines are now open. If there’s anything you want to tell me about the last time you lost a piece of your heart, or you need some advice on finding it again, or you just want to hear a song about it, then call me right now. I’m Melanie Rogers, and I’m here to help.”

  I recalled the honey-voiced redhead with the emerald-green eyes I’d met in Robert’s office. “Let me introduce you to an old friend,” Robert had said by way of introduction. “Melanie Rogers, this is Kate Sinclair. We go back a very long way.” All the way back to high school and Sandra Lyons, I thought, understanding that some things never change.

  It seems almost inconceivable to me now that I could have seriously considered jeopardizing my marriage to Larry for someone like Robert. The truth is that I love my husband, that I always have. I can’t imagine life without him. Lately, Larry and I have been talking about leaving Florida, going back to Pittsburgh. We’ve never made any real friends here, and Larry says he misses the change in seasons. His golf game is the pits, he claims, and besides, he can no longer look at a golf club without thinking of my mother and Colin Friendly.