Tattooed

by Pamela Callow

  If the porch was gone, did that mean…?

  She broke into a run, her sleep-deprived body resisting the urgency that made her heart race. Her panic dropped a notch when she saw that the small, shingled shed her father had built at the far end of the property still stood. Her mother had not had it removed.

  Instinctively, she glanced at the woods behind the shed. Her skin broke out in goose bumps. The small break in the trees leading to the oceanfront path was still there, albeit overgrown. She had spent many hours walking the path as a child, and many hours sneaking back and forth to the bunker on that path as a teen.

  The last time she had used that path was in the very early morning hours after the Mardi Gras.

  When she finally arrived at the end of the path, she wanted to throw herself on the ground and weep. She was home. She was alive.

  McNally and Lovett had not yet found her.

  She crouched in the wild underbrush and stared across the lawn at her house. The shrine to her mother’s daring, her mother’s ambition, her mother’s ego.

  She tucked the gun into her waistband and sprinted to the back door. As she expected, her mother had left the door unlocked for her. She slipped inside, grateful for the new, silent hinges.

  She paused in the kitchen, listening.

  No sound of anyone still awake. But she could not risk going up to her room. She might wake someone.

  She tiptoed through the living room. Then she crept down the basement stairs and paused at the bottom.

  Still silent.

  Thank God.

  She hurried to the laundry room.

  The phone hung on the wall right next to the doorway. She snatched the receiver, her hands shaking.

  In her mind’s eye, she pictured Heather Rigby lying on the ground. Blood gushing from the wound in her chest.

  She could not speak from the blood entering her airway.

  But her eyes begged Kenzie.

  Why? she asked.

  Help me.

  Help me!

  Kenzie had turned and run.

  Did Heather think Kenzie was going for help?

  Was she hanging on by sheer force of will, believing that Kenzie would send someone, anyone, to save her?

  But if she called 911, they would trace the call.

  They would figure out she killed Heather.

  Kenzie slammed the receiver back onto the handset. Her body broke into a rank sweat.

  It’s too late, Heather.

  It was too late when you flirted with my boyfriend.

  The gun was heavy and awkward against her hip bone. She put the gun in the sink and stripped off her torn, dirty punk witch costume, fingering the fabric stiff with dried blood. Heather’s blood.

  She stuffed the shredded clothing into a small plastic grocery bag and tied it so tightly that the only way to open it again would be to cut it.

  She soaped off the worst of the dirt and blood from her body. Then she washed the gun. She rinsed the sink thoroughly, praying that the sound of the water running through the pipes would not wake anyone. For once, she was grateful for her mother’s design work. The house’s internal functions were incredibly quiet.

  She changed into a pair of jeans and a large flannel shirt that lay in the laundry basket, and grabbed some more clothes, which she shoved into another shopping bag. She slipped the gun back into her waistband. The barrel dripped cold water down her stomach.

  Money.

  She needed money.

  She ran back upstairs, clutching both grocery bags, and unlatched the curio cabinet in the kitchen.

  The solid silver teapot set that had belonged to her maternal great-grandmother should give her a bit of cash. Her mother had always hated it, anyway. She wrapped it in her fresh clothes, hoping the weight of the silver wouldn’t tear the plastic bag.

  Then she slipped back outside. She glanced at the sky.

  Dawn lit the edges of the horizon in a fiery glow.

  She had very little time.

  She ran through the mist-soaked grass to the shed in the back. Three months ago, her mother had planted a Japanese wisteria at the corner of the small outbuilding.

  Kenzie knelt on the ground behind the bush and out of sight of the house, oblivious to the wet soaking the knees of her jeans. She dug with both hands until she hit the substratum. It was only three or four inches below the topsoil. Not very deep.

  It would have to do. She didn’t have time to run back out to the cliff. And she didn’t dare run the risk of encountering McNally.

  Besides, the bush would grow over it. No one would find it.

  She dropped the gun into the hole, glancing over her shoulder at the sky. Dawn was in full throttle, sending the night scurrying for cover. She scooped the earth over the gun until the hole was filled. Then she smoothed the soil until the hole was indistinguishable.

  She grabbed her two shopping bags and hiked into town, trusting her secret to the Japanese wisteria.

  It had not proven a faithful confidante.

  In fact, it had disappeared.

  Kenzie checked behind the shed, wondering if she had mistaken the location of the shrub.

  But there were no plants there, nothing. Just overgrown grass that her mother would never have permitted in her younger, healthier years.

  Kenzie eased open the shed door. The interior was dark, barely any light showing through the dusty window. And musty. Her nose wrinkled at the smell. Something had died in there recently.

  She stepped inside. And walked straight into gossamer strands of an elaborate spider’s web.

  Wiping the web away with the back of her hand, she groped along the wall for the shelf where her father had kept his gardening tools. Something rustled in the shed’s nether regions.

  She hurried out the door, shutting it behind her, and threw herself on the ground where she remembered burying the gun. The soil lifted relatively easily, a sign that it had once been tilled for a garden.

  Ten minutes later, she had dug a small trench down to the substratum.

  No gun.

  Who had found it?

  And what did they do with it?

  Would they know its significance?

  She scooped back the earth into the trench, smoothing the loosened turf over the excavated patches.

  Then another thought hit her. Actually, it slammed into her. Leaving her breathless.

  Was that why her mother went to the police station today? To turn in the gun?

  A pain that she’d banished seventeen years ago snaked around her heart, choking her breath. She lumbered to her feet.

  Why should she be surprised?

  She returned the trowel in the shed and closed the door.

  Save for the ruined spider’s web, no one would ever know she had been here.

  But what if her mother had taken the gun to the station? And was placing it in the hands of Detective Drake?

  They could be on their way here.

  She broke into a run, cursing the time she’d lost searching for the gun that most likely was encased in an evidence bag on Detective Drake’s desk. She rounded the corner of the house.

  And stopped dead in her tracks.

  Her mother waited by Kenzie’s rental car, her wheelchair effectively blocking the driver’s door.

  Kenzie could take her down. Easily. Move the wheelchair and get the hell out of here.

  She approached her mother, slowly, warily, searching her mother’s face for signs of betrayal.

  But the disease that trapped Frances in the crumbling structure of her body also provided her with a poker face.

  When Kenzie was a child, she could never hide from her mother’s all-seeing gaze. Those sky-blue eyes had an intensity that was not deflected by mere skin and bone. They could see into Kenzie’s very core.

  In that moment, as twilight surrendered to night, Kenzie acknowledged why she had been fascinated with full body tattooing from such an early age.

  It had been a means of protection. Of allow
ing one element of herself to be revealed with abandon and passion, while protecting the most tender parts of her psyche.

  Those parts that her mother had prodded with unerring precision when Kenzie was a child.

  Kenzie now realized she could never hide from the woman who had created those parts. There would always be a lifeline between them, one that each of them had cast aside at different stages of their lives, but now pulsed in the dusk.

  “Why are you here, Kenzie?” her mother asked.

  Her mother’s gaze flickered over Kenzie’s mud-stained knees, the panicked expression in her eyes.

  Kenzie could revert to her seventeen-year-old self’s lying ways and proffer a host of different explanations, but she knew her mother had given her a chance to explain herself. Why did the police suspect her and why was she digging in the back garden? That’s what her mother wanted to know.

  Kenzie glanced down at her hands. Dirt ringed the edges of her nails.

  It was damned obvious why she was here—if her mother knew that the gun had been buried under the bush.

  “I was looking for something I had left behind,” Kenzie said.

  “Did you find it?”

  “No.” Did you, Mom?

  And, more to the point, what did you do with it?

  Had she turned it in to the police, one final act of clearing her conscience before she left this mortal coil?

  They gazed into one another’s eyes. So identical in color, shape and acuity. So different in the things they had seen. Kenzie wondered, somewhat hysterically, what her mother would do if she possessed Kenzie’s eyes and could replay all that they had witnessed.

  “The winter that you left home was hard on the Japanese wisteria,” her mother said, her speech painstakingly slow. Kenzie bit down her impatience. She needed to know what her mother had done with the gun.

  An engine throbbed in the distance.

  Were the police already on the way?

  No, the noise grew softer, not louder.

  “The roots did not have enough time to establish themselves,” her mother said. “It didn’t survive. I took it out the following spring.”

  “That’s too bad,” Kenzie said. Just say it, Mom. Just put me out of my agony.

  “I was sad to see it die.”

  Her mother knew. She knew.

  She had found the gun.

  Kenzie’s pulse pounded in her veins. “Wher—” She cleared her throat. “What did you do with it?”

  “I took care of it. You don’t need to worry. It’s gone.”

  It took a moment for Kenzie to comprehend what her mother had just told her.

  She had gotten rid of the gun for her.

  “Thank you,” Kenzie said. Her heart lightened.

  If the gun was gone, the police had nothing to connect her to the murder. She could go back to New York. And never set foot in this godforsaken place again.

  But what about Kate Lange? She still had to deal with her.

  And she needed the gun to do it.

  Her heart began to race. What had her mother done with it?

  “Kenzie, I confessed—”

  Confesssssed. Her mother spoke so laboriously, the shock hit Kenzie in slow motion.

  “—to the murder of Heather Rigby.”

  “Why?” Kenzie stared at her mother. Why would she do that?

  “I don’t know why I killed her,” her mother said, deliberately misunderstanding her. “But I’ve regretted it ever since.” Her mother paused. “I wanted to spend my final days getting to know you again. I’m sorry.”

  Tears sprang to Kenzie’s eyes with such force that her face twisted from the stinging pain. “You shouldn’t have done that,” she whispered.

  “It is the right thing to do. Her family will have closure.”

  “You’ll die in prison.”

  “ALS has already taken my freedom, Kenzie,” Frances said. “This is a short detour to the end.”

  “Oh, God.” Kenzie closed her eyes.

  Guilt constricted her heart. Yet she reveled in the knowledge that she had escaped a terrible fate.

  Her mother was dying.

  How many days would she actually spend in prison? A few months? Weeks?

  Versus the years Kenzie would spend in jail. Everything she had worked for would be gone.

  But she couldn’t leave her mother without closure. She needed to know the answer to one question. Otherwise, she would never be able to rest. “What did you do with the gun?”

  Her mother’s gaze held hers.

  Oh, God. She didn’t throw it in the ocean.

  Panic gripped her. “Where is it, Mom?”

  “I packed it up with your things and put it in a storage locker.”

  Kenzie could not believe her ears.

  Her mother had packed a murder weapon with her bedroom furniture?

  “Where’s the key?” she asked, her voice urgent.

  Tears welled in Frances’ eyes. “I gave it to someone I trust. To deliver it to you after I die.”

  “Who is it, Mom?”

  Her mother’s eyes beseeched her. “Wait until I die, Kenzie. Then you will be safe.”

  “Mom, please, just tell me who you gave it to.”

  “Kate Lange.”

  The blood froze in Kenzie’s veins.

  Are you kidding me?

  Kate Lange—who was the one person who could link her to Heather Rigby’s tattoo—now had the key to the location of the murder weapon?

  Kenzie’s stomach churned from the effect of no sleep, no food—and no murder weapon.

  “I’m sorry, Kenzie,” her mother said. “I gave it to her before…before the girl was found.”

  Kenzie stared into the face that was her mother’s face and yet not her face. At the short, sparse gray hair that had once been as long and gloriously red as her own. At the cool determination in her gaze that had been the one constant in Kenzie’s life.

  This would probably be the last time she saw her mother. “It’s okay, Mom.”