Nowhere Girl

by Susan Strecker

  Dr. Mirando was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “What would that mean, Cady, getting on with your life?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the point. I don’t know what I am without counting the days and writing about all these innocent people getting killed.”

  He didn’t answer, but I could hear him breathing. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go with it a moment. Let’s say you are here on earth to do Savannah’s bidding, even in her death. What do you think she’d want you to do?”

  I stared at myself in the strange mirror of that black window. “I think she’d want me to let go,” I said, and I felt a sob in my throat. “I don’t think she’d want me to hang on anymore.” And then I cried and cried. It was a different cry from the one with Patrick at the orchard. It was a cry for help, it was a cry for forgiveness, it was a cry to my sister to please help me find a way out of this murderous labyrinth.

  CHAPTER

  45

  I spent the morning cleaning and going through the mail, doing all the things I’d ignored while the binge had taken over my life. By the time I was done, I needed some dark chocolate and mindless TV. And then I remembered Brady was coming. I felt a little sick to my stomach from fatigue, but I also had that high school crush butterfly feeling, and I made a salad in case he hadn’t had lunch yet. I’d taken a pair of shears and had gone out to the garden to cut flowers so I could make an arrangement for the dining room, and the house smelled sweet, like roses and peonies.

  Brady got there as I was dozing off on the couch. He was carrying a bunch of daylillies wrapped in wet tissue paper, which was amazing since he’d roared up on his motorcycle. I took the flowers from him and gave him a quick hug.

  “Shit,” I said, “it feels like a million years since I’ve seen you.”

  He followed me into the house and waited in the kitchen while I got a vase from the pantry. “Have you gone on the lam? Where’ve you been?”

  I sighed loudly. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.” He went to the refrigerator and took out two beers. He flipped the tops off and handed me one. “Let’s sit down, and you can tell me your troubles.”

  “Thanks.” I kicked off my flip-flops, and we sat on opposite ends of the ugly white couch. “I don’t even know where to start.” As I was thinking about everything that had happened in the last couple of weeks, I realized I hadn’t told Brady about Patrick reopening the case or what Gabby and I had found in the storage locker.

  “How about at the beginning,” he said.

  I barked a laugh. “On a cold November day in 1998, my sister was murdered.”

  “What?” He sounded more panicked than confused.

  “You said start at the beginning. There it is.”

  He put the back of his hand to my forehead. “Are you feeling okay? I’m having a hard time following you.”

  I shook my head as if to clear it. “I’m sorry. I know I’m not making sense, but nothing makes sense right now. One of the cops who investigated Savannah’s murder showed up at my house a couple of months ago to tell me he’s reopening her case. And he asked to borrow the guest book from her funeral so he can start reinterviewing people. So while Gabby and I were at my parents’ storage unit looking for it, we found Savannah’s old diaries.” I stopped long enough to take a long sip of my beer. “Diaries, mind you, she never even told me she kept. And guess what we found?” But I didn’t wait for him to answer. “She had a boyfriend. My sister was madly in love, apparently, with the greatest guy in the world and never even told me. What the fuck is that about?”

  He stopped with the bottle almost to his lips. “Really?” he asked. “She loved him?”

  “Seriously? I tell you that my dead sister’s case is getting reopened and that she had a secret boyfriend who was probably married, and the only thing you find odd is that she loved the guy? I bet you it was Mr. Fitz.”

  He set his beer on the table without a coaster. I was sure Greg, wherever he was, could feel it. “The physics teacher? What makes you say that?”

  “Two things: she never named him by name, and more importantly, she never told me about him. He must have been someone off limits. Like a teacher or an old married guy.”

  He reached over and squeezed my shoulder. “Wow. No wonder you’ve gone underground. That’s a lot to deal with.”

  “Oh, that’s not even the half of it. While Gabby and I were looking for the guest book, I found an old slam book that she and I kept. I read it when I got home and found all these entries about how much Gabby hated Savannah. Called her stuck-up and bitchy and a slut.” Brady winced. “And then, to top it all off, I went back to see that lunatic Cauchek even though you wouldn’t return my calls, and he told me that nothing is ever as it seems.” I had a flash of one of my meetings with the hypnotist, Dr. Corcores, and how he told me we have to push past what is easy to see the truth. “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “Don’t listen to anything that monster has to say. He was screwing with you, getting inside your head.”

  I finished my beer and deliberately set the bottle on the table next to the coaster. Fuck Greg. “No, no. I think he may have been onto something, because after I saw him, I ran into Emma and—”

  “Jesus, the universe is conspiring against you.”

  I smiled. “No shit, but it gets worse. Emma all but told me my family knows who did it and we’re covering it up.” I stopped talking long enough to take a breath. “What the fuck is going on here?”

  Brady turned toward me and took both my hands in his. I didn’t get that swishy feeling in my stomach like I used to when he touched me. It was like my body knew that if we kissed again, I wouldn’t feel anything.

  “Okay, let’s take one thing at a time,” he said. “How do you feel about Savannah having a boyfriend?”

  A warmth came over me. “You know what? It makes me happy. Savannah was always in such a hurry to grow up. She started having sex before we were in high school, and she kissed every boy she could. She smoked pot and only wanted to hang out with the senior girls. It was like she was trying to be an adult. And it just made me sad. I know she didn’t care about any of those boys, and I wonder if she even liked Scarlet and Camilla and all those other bitchy girls. But knowing she had someone she really loved, even if it was Mr. Fitz…”

  “Why did girls like that guy so much?”

  “Because he was so cute.” I giggled, and it felt good. “But anyway, I read all three of her diaries four times. Her boyfriend made her happy.”

  “Did you find anything else in the storage unit? Pictures or notes or anything?”

  I let out my breath slowly. “Nope. I went through every box in there and didn’t find anything. Except,” I said, thinking of that one odd picture, “for a photo in our sophomore yearbook.”

  “Was she making out with Mr. Fitz?”

  I made a face. “Ick. No. She was with that pretty senior girl Brittain, and she was watching someone. I can’t explain it, but she looked so happy. Savannah was restless, always ready to try the next thing, experience something new. But in that photograph, she seemed so … content.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. Who was she looking at?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t know; his head had been cut off, but I could tell from the build and the belt buckle that it was definitely a guy.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Relatively. If it was a girl, she was awfully tall and must have had a cowboy fetish.”

  “Was she wearing cowboy boots?”

  I laughed. “No. She, or he, had on this gigantic silver belt buckle like people in rodeos win when they don’t get killed by the bulls.”

  He shifted awkwardly on the couch and put his hands in his lap.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “Ants in your pants?”

  “Sure, sure, I’m fine.” But he kept squirming.

  My eyes went to his hands and what they were covering. His face went white.

  I scra
mbled to my feet. “Actually, the belt buckle looked like yours.” I ran to the back of the couch, putting a barrier between us. “It was you.” All at once everything made sense. “You were the secret boyfriend.”

  “What? Me? No. I barely knew her.” But he sounded like a bad actor, high pitched and nervous.

  “That’s why she never told me. Because she knew I was in love with you. It was you.”

  He stood up, and I backed away. “Cady, come on. Why do you look like you’re about to jump out of your skin? Sit down, and let’s talk about this.”

  “Not until you admit you were her secret boyfriend.”

  He cast his eyes downward. “I was,” he mumbled. “It was me.”

  “So you’ve known. All these years, you’ve known that I loved you in high school. You and Savannah must have gotten a good laugh over the porky, ugly twin pining over you.”

  “You’re not ugly, and we never laughed,” Brady said. His voice sounded like a wound, wide open and bleeding. “Savannah adored you; she thought the sun rose and set on you.” He came around the couch, hands out, palms up, but I backed away into the kitchen. “She always said how smart you were, how together you were, how she had this”—he tried to find the words—“this emptiness that—”

  “I don’t want to hear this,” I said. “I don’t think I can.” I heard a strange ringing in my ears, like someone had set off a firecracker right near me. I had the urge to run out the front door, to catapult myself out of this reality, because it was all starting to come together. Brady only wanted to be near me because of Savannah. “You’d been there before,” I said. He had his head down, eyes on the floor. “To that ice cream place on the shore that she loved so much. That’s why you took me there.” He didn’t deny it. “And you’d been to the old barn. You knew Bliss.”

  “Cady.”

  “She introduced you to her horse.”

  “Yes.” He sounded resigned.

  And I saw now that of course Savannah had loved him. Brady was sexy, but he was kind too, and that was what Savannah did: she brought kind people into her midst and made them love her, and then they did things like drive her to ice cream places two hours away and make friends with a horse who hated people. She would have loved how quiet Brady was, how he went to his car during lunch to listen to music and wasn’t wrapped up in sports and keg parties.

  “And all this time, I thought that maybe the chubby sister had a chance,” I said. My cell phone rang, but I didn’t answer it.

  “Please, Cady, it’s not like that. I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you since that first day at the prison, but then you asked me to help you, and we started spending all this time together. And I really, really enjoyed it. I loved being with you, and I didn’t want to ruin that by telling you I had a past with your sister.”

  The house phone rang six times before the answering machine picked up, Greg’s voice echoing, telling callers to leave a message. I heard Patrick talking.

  “Cady,” he was saying. “Something’s happened with the case. Call me immediately.”

  Brady was quiet while we listened. When Patrick quit talking, I said, “Brady, I need you to leave.”

  “We didn’t laugh at you,” he said again. “She never told you about me because she knew how you felt about me and didn’t want to hurt your feelings. She didn’t want you to think she was taking me away from you.”

  “Okay,” I said, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. “Just go.” I came around the counter. “I have to call Patrick back.” I grabbed for the phone, but my hands were shaking, and I dropped it. “Thanks for telling me the truth.” I could hear the bitterness in my voice, and I hated it. I’d been so happy when I found out Savannah had loved someone. Why couldn’t I be thankful? I reached down and picked up the phone, waiting for him to leave. Why was I still so jealous of my sister? “Go,” I said. I knew I was being horrible. Savannah had loved him. He had loved Savannah. He probably knew things about her that I never did, but all she’d had and all I didn’t was coming back to me in a rush, and I couldn’t stand looking at him.

  Brady raised his hand in what seemed like a final wave. And then I watched him open the door and walk through it. While I was dialing Patrick’s number, I heard the motorcycle roar off.

  “I need to talk to you about something,” Patrick said as soon as he answered. “And I don’t want you to say no right away.”

  Jesus. Why did everyone need to tell me something today? Had he secretly been in love with my sister too?

  I felt spent, wrecked inside, and I said, “Okay.”

  “I want to bring in a psychic. Her name is Charlotte Reid, and she’s the real deal. I would have talked to you about her sooner, but she—”

  “Retired ten years ago,” I finished for him. “I know who she is.” She was a twin whose brother had killed himself. I’d read an interview with her after his death. She said Michael was also psychic and ended his life because he didn’t know how to process the unspeakable things he knew.

  “Believe me,” he said. “I’ve worked with plenty of psychics, most of whom are brought in by the families of victims desperate for answers. And the majority of them are crackpots. Charlotte is different. She has a gift.”

  “It’s not a gift.” I went to the front door and opened it. Brady was gone.

  “Call it what you want, but she’s for real.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.” I closed the door and felt sick. “I don’t think what she can do is a gift. It must be terribly painful to know and feel the things that she does.”

  “That’s why she quit. She wanted to shut it off; she said it disturbed her whole life. It was like a staticky radio station that got left on, and she could never get away from the noise.”

  “I know.” I had a flash of Michael, a man I’d never met, hanging in his bedroom closet. “What brought her back?”

  He sighed into the phone. “Savannah.”

  I was still thinking about Brady. “Can we see her now, before dinner?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll come pick you up.”

  I started to hang up, but I heard Patrick’s voice. “Cady?” he asked. “Charlotte said she needs two things from you to make this work.”

  I was so drained I didn’t think I could write my name at that moment, never mind come up with trinkets for a psychic.

  “She needs a picture of Savannah, and she needs you to completely clear your mind of anything but your sister.”

  “But Brady…” I started to say, but then I stopped. “Okay. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  CHAPTER

  46

  Charlotte Reid had been beautiful. I saw it as soon as we walked in the door and caught sight of her wedding picture on the mantel. Cheekbones to die for. Perfect glossy hair, long lashes, and a luscious mouth. Now she was an old woman, and every line on her face seemed to tell a story I was dying to hear. Her eyes were still a captivating denim color, and she was slight, spritelike. She wore lengths of turquoise around her throat and an amber bracelet wound around one arm and rings on every finger. Neither Patrick nor I could take our eyes off her.

  “Come in, dear.” She held my elbow and smiled at Patrick over her shoulder. “I made some tea with honey. You’ve been through some trying times these past days.” Jesus. What had my dead sister told her?

  Charlotte sat us down on a velvet love seat, and she settled on a chaise longue with dark wood and gold tacks. It wasn’t until she tilted her head slightly to the side that I realized she looked like Savannah might have looked at seventy.

  “I feel like I know you,” she said, reaching over and patting my knee. A man came in; I could tell by the color of his eyes and the shape of his mouth that he was Charlotte’s son. He set down a pot of tea and a plate of cookies on the coffee table between us. Then he bowed slightly and moved away.

  “Don’t you?” I asked. Patrick reached out and took a cookie. “Isn’t that your secret superpower?” God, this was awkward. “I mean…�
�� But I shut my mouth.

  She laughed, letting me off the hook. “It is my superpower, but it’s not so secret.” My knees were touching Patrick’s, but there was no room for me to move over. And I liked feeling him close to me. Her house was pretty, very comfortable, and filled with leather club chairs, bright rugs, gold-framed portraits, and hanging marionette puppets. With chipping paint and exquisite detail, they must have been antiques. But even in all that comfortable beauty, I felt nervous. I knew this about Charlotte: she used to be called in on the highest-profile cases, kidnappings and missing children of the extremely wealthy. When Michael hanged himself, she’d stopped working, though she stayed in Princeton and was now somewhat of a recluse. I’d written to her, tried to find her number; I’d done it under the guise of research, but as a psychic, she must have known why I really wanted to see her. “Have some tea, and take a moment to relax, dear. This can be a lot to process all at once.”

  “Actually, I believe in psychic connections,” I said. “Savannah and I knew things about each other that we shouldn’t have.”

  “You were identical?”