by Alana Terry
Marx shook his hand.
“Ma’am.” He tipped his hat politely in my direction before exiting the hotel room.
Marx closed and locked the door and then dropped onto the edge of his bed with a tired sigh. He rubbed his hands over his face.
“He’s angry with you for bringing me here,” I said softly.
Marx nodded as he pulled his hands down his face and dropped them into his lap. “I noticed that. He threw a temper tantrum like a five-year-old. If he was thinkin’ clearly, he never would’ve slashed my tires, ‘cause now we’re stuck exactly where he doesn’t want us to be.”
He picked my knife up off the bed where he’d dropped it and turned it over in his hands. I saw the unspoken questions wrinkle his forehead. “I’m curious why you brought a kitchen knife on our road trip, but I have a feelin’ it’s one of those things I shouldn’t ask about.”
I gave him a tight smile, and he held the knife out to me. I took it. “I’m gonna take a shower. I’ll see you in the morning.” I walked out of the room, gathered my things, and went to clean up.
After my shower, I stretched out beneath the strange blankets in the uncomfortably hard bed and closed my eyes. I tried to sleep, but my body refused to relax.
When I glanced at the clock on the side table, it was almost four a.m., and I was no closer to sleep now than when I’d crawled beneath the blankets two hours ago.
I stared at the doors standing open between the adjoining rooms; they allowed too many dark memories to slink into bed with me. I flung off the blankets and slipped out of the bed.
I tiptoed across the room to the doors and peered through the doorway into the dark room. I could hear the quiet rhythm of Marx’s breathing. I knew he would probably be angry with me for closing the door, especially after the killer had paid us a visit, but if I didn’t, I would never be able to sleep.
The door clicked quietly as I pushed it shut, and my fingers hesitated briefly on the dead bolt before I flipped it. Some of the tension immediately drained from my body. I grabbed the knife back out of my bag on the floor and curled up beneath the blankets. It wasn’t long before I drifted to sleep.
Chapter 25
WE ARRIVED AT THE PRISON thirty minutes late because I overslept. Marx hadn’t said a word to me about the fact that I had locked the door between our rooms, but I knew he’d noticed, because he woke me up by knocking on it.
He was getting better about not asking uncomfortable questions.
I hesitated in the doorway of the prison visiting room when I saw the woman I had once thought was my mother. She sat at a round metal table in the middle of the room. Her blond hair had thinned, and it hung over her shoulders in wisps of blond and silvery streaks.
Isabel Lane. She was the only mother I could ever remember having. She and her husband had cared for me for two years, and I thought they were my family. That was, until they were arrested for drug trafficking and I was tossed into the foster care system. No one really knew how I came to be in their care.
Her blue eyes flitted around the room in search of her visitor. I almost turned around and walked out the door I’d entered through, but Marx was standing behind me.
“Are you sure you wanna do this?” he asked quietly.
“No,” I admitted pathetically.
I couldn’t quite untangle my feelings for her. She and her husband had found me or taken me from somewhere and pretended to be my family, and that made me want to hate her. But they had never hurt me, and they had provided for me as if I were theirs. And no matter what crimes they had committed, or lies they had told, they were the first people I remembered and I had loved them with the unconditional devotion of a child.
“There’s somethin’ you should know, Holly. I meant to tell you last night, but . . .” He sighed.
“What?” I asked warily.
“Isabel’s not just in here for drug traffickin’. I had Sully look into her for me before we left New York.” He hesitated. “She and her husband murdered somebody—a rival drug dealer.”
I wished I could say I was surprised.
I remembered Izzy whisking me away when a confrontation broke out on a dark sidewalk between Paul and another man. Paul had come back to the camper later that night agitated and covered in blood. In hindsight, I didn’t think all the blood on his clothes had been his.
Now I couldn’t help but wonder if Paul had killed that man. But Izzy had been with me that night; she hadn’t murdered anyone. Unless . . . that man wasn’t the drug dealer they were accused of killing. I tried to push aside the awful possibilities. I didn’t really want to know.
“None of that changes the fact that we still need answers,” I said. I drew in a deep breath and then forced myself to walk toward Izzy’s table.
Her eyes skipped over me and then snapped back with a spark of recognition. She straightened, and an expression of affection and astonishment brightened her haggard face. “Holly?”
Her emphatic greeting almost made me miss a step. I forced a reply from my tense throat as I stopped in front of her table. “Hello, Izzy.” It came out a little more hollow than I had intended.
Her gaze swept over me, comparing the woman before her with the child she remembered. A lot had changed in sixteen years, but enough had stayed the same that she recognized me. “You were such a pretty girl. I knew you would grow up to be beautiful.”
Her praise made me self-conscious. I sat down on the metal bench as if it were a bomb and I might need to run for my life at any moment. Izzy reached across the table in the hopes that I would take her hands, and I forgot to be civil as I snapped mine away from her. She had no business touching me.
The initial shock of my rejection played across her face before hurt took its place. She drew her empty hands back and gripped the edge of the table.
“I’m . . . sorry,” I said after a moment. I hadn’t come here to hurt her. “I don’t like to be touched.”
She tilted her head as she regarded me quizzically. “That never used to bother you. You were a very cuddly child.”
A memory of her tucking the blankets in around my body, cocooning me in safety, as she gently rubbed my head until I fell asleep floated to the front of my mind. I cleared my throat. “Well, things change.”
“That must make relationships difficult,” she said.
Twist that knife in my heart a little more, Izzy, thanks. I glanced subtly at Marx, who lingered several feet to my left. She was so enthralled by my presence that she hadn’t noticed him yet. I wasn’t sure how she would react when she did. “I manage,” was all I told her.
“I tried to write you,” she said. “But no one would tell me where you were.”
“I moved around a lot.” I hoped she wouldn’t ask too many questions. I hadn’t come here to give her a summary of my messed-up childhood.
“Oh,” she said, her face clouding with sadness. “I always hoped you would find a good home. You were such a sweet girl.”
Anger and hurt crowded my chest, and I glanced away so she couldn’t see them on my face. “If you really believed that, Izzy, you would’ve made more of an effort to keep me.”
She flinched. I knew it wasn’t a kind thing to say, and it was off topic, but I couldn’t seem to stop the words from escaping.
“I . . . I wanted to keep you. I would have, but . . .”
I bit down on my lips as she stammered meaningless excuses. I needed to get this conversation back on track before she crumbled into tears or I got up and left. “Do you remember the night you found me?”
She stopped stammering and nodded. “Of course I do. That was the best day of our lives. I always wanted a little girl, and you just . . . dropped right into our laps like it was meant to be.” Her blue eyes grew distant with memory.
I saw the disapproving clench of Marx’s jaw out of the corner of my vision. I had no doubt he would describe me “dropping into their laps” as kidnapping.
I tried to ignore him as I pushed forward. “You never
really told me about that day.”
Her pale skin took on an ashen hue, and she looked down at the table as she shook her head. “There’s nothing to tell, really.” But her body language belied her words. She was hiding something, and that secret frightened her. “Tell me about you. Do you have a boyfriend?”
Wow, she was definitely avoiding my question. If she expected to distract me with small talk, she was going to be very disappointed. I didn’t do small talk—at least not without butchering it to pieces.
“A pretty girl like you must have boys falling at your feet,” she said.
Most men didn’t bother with me. I assumed it was because they either didn’t find me attractive or because I gave off a touch-me-and-I’ll-stab-you vibe that sent them fleeing in the other direction. “No, no boyfriend.”
“A husband? You’re not wearing a ring, but I hear that’s the thing these days for independent young women.”
Marx tried not to smile when she described me as independent. I shot him a glare out of the corner of my eye. She didn’t even know me.
“Izzy, I’m not here to talk about my personal life.”
Her attention shifted to Marx when she suddenly noticed him hovering oh so covertly a few feet to my left, and she squinted at him suspiciously. She sat back a little stiffly, and her blue eyes took on a frosty sharpness I’d never seen before. “You look like a cop.”
Marx arched an eyebrow at her. Well, there was no dancing around his presence now. Izzy had scented him out like a bloodhound, and now her guard was up.
“It’s the cop face,” I told him. I waved my hand in front of my face for emphasis. “You get this look.”
“What exactly does my cop face look like?” he asked.
“Um . . . I-wanna-slam-your-head-off-the-hood-of-my-car-and-handcuff-you-because-I-think-you’re-the-scum-of-the-earth,” I tried to explain. It’s not like it was an easy thing to describe.
“I have never slammed anybody’s head off the hood of my car. That would dent my car,” he said with complete seriousness. “The pavement, though . . . that’s a whole ‘nother matter.”
Izzy’s eyes bulged with disbelief as she looked between us. “You can’t be serious. You two are . . . you’re too old for her.”
“Izzy, I’m twenty-eight,” I pointed out.
“And when you were ten, he was what . . . thirty?” she asked in obvious disgust. “You shouldn’t be touching her at all, you pig,” she spat, turning her venomous glare back on Marx. “She deserves better than the likes of you.”
Marx’s expression remained neutral, as if her words bounced right off him. I, however, was a little disturbed by the image she was painting, and wanted to scrub the inside of my head out with a Brillo Pad.
“We’re not together,” I explained.
“Then why did you bring him?” she demanded.
“He’s a friend.”
She gave me a pitying look as she explained in a voice that was disturbingly motherly, “Cops are not friends, Holly. You can’t trust them.” . . . says the lying drug dealer . . .
“He’s trying to help me.”
“Into a jail cell or into his bed? Because that’s the only way they work.” She sneered at Marx, and he gave her a flat look that conveyed just how little he thought of her opinion.
I stared at her in silent disbelief. I had my reasons for disliking the police, but my hatred of them paled in comparison to hers. If she could’ve set Marx on fire with her eyes, she would’ve kicked back and watched him burn with a smile on her face. What could possibly have made her despise anyone with a badge so completely?
Marx crossed his arms over his chest and looked appropriately intimidating as he grumbled, “Hate me all you like, Ms. Lane, but if you care about Holly at all, you’ll answer her questions.”
Izzy drew herself up like an angry cat. “I love Holly. Don’t try to manipulate . . .”
“Stop it, Izzy!” I shouted, smacking the table with my hands as I stood up. She blinked in surprise and snapped her mouth shut. I had learned that tactic from Marx firsthand, and it worked like a charm. “He didn’t put you here. You did.”
She folded her arms and gave him one last hateful glare before returning her attention to me. “Whether it was him or some other cop who put me here, it doesn’t matter. They’re all the same.”
Hearing her bitter words was like looking into a mirror a month ago, and I didn’t like what I saw. I had believed that same thing, but I couldn’t anymore. Jacob hadn’t been cruel—he’d been innocent; Sam wasn’t indifferent—he was loyal; and Marx broke just about every mold I expected cops to fit into.
“You chose this life when you chose to break the law for a living,” I told her, my voice quiet but taut with anger. “You . . . killed someone, Izzy. You trafficked drugs.”
She lifted her chin proudly. “I provided for my family.”
“Illegally.”
She scoffed. “You sound like a cop. Is that what you are now?”
The coldness in her voice stung, and I sat back down on the bench slowly. “I’m a photographer. I take pictures of landscapes and people.” Why did it matter to me what she thought? I didn’t need her approval or her acceptance.
She searched my face to see if I was telling the truth. “You always did love nature . . . except for the woods. You would never go near the woods.” Her stiff posture relaxed, and she rested her hands back on the table as she leaned forward. “I know most people don’t approve of what I chose to do for a living. But it put food on the table and clothes on your back. We had a home. We were a family, Holly, and we were happy. That’s all that mattered.”
I closed my eyes briefly and shook my head. She’d convinced herself that the ends justified the means, but they hadn’t. The means destroyed everything she had tried to build. “You should’ve gotten a job to support the family. Paul should’ve gotten a job. But you chose drugs over me. Do you know what that cost me?” Emotion made my voice higher than usual even as I tried to whisper. “Do you have any idea what your illegal support put me through?”
“Holly,” Marx said in warning. We had discussed this conversation on the trip over, and I knew I was steering it from information gathering headlong into painful personal history, but I couldn’t stop myself. Her selfish, warped perspective was too much for me to swallow.
“Twelve foster homes, Izzy,” I told her. “You have no idea what that did to me. What they did to me.”
She struggled to find a response. “We were just doing what we always did.”
“You should’ve stopped.” Hot tears blurred my vision. “When you decided to include me in your family, you should’ve stopped selling drugs. You should’ve chosen me.”
She drew back as if I had slapped her. “Holly, I . . .”
“You didn’t choose me,” I whispered with more pain and sadness than I ever realized I’d buried. I could’ve been happy with them as my family. My life could’ve been so very different.
“Maybe that’s enough for now,” Marx suggested.
“No!” Izzy shouted, pounding the table with her fist hard enough to startle the entire room full of visitors. She leveled an icy glare at him. “You are not taking her. I’ve waited sixteen years for this day.”
“I don’t think you deserve this day,” he replied evenly.
I got up from the table and walked to the other side of the room despite her pleas for me to stay. I couldn’t stand to sit at the same table with her anymore. I needed a minute to pull myself back together before there was any hope of finishing the interrogation.
“Holly, baby, please . . . I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry we didn’t make better choices. What can I do? How can I make it right?” She pleaded from across the room. I could hear the tears in her voice, but I turned my back to her and rested my forehead against the wall.
“You can’t make it right,” Marx told her, and there was no sympathy in his voice as she sobbed at the table in front of him. Her cries grew muffled as she cover
ed her face with her hands. “If I were her, I would never forgive you.”
Izzy drew in a long, shuddering breath and snarled, “I don’t care what you think. You don’t know her. She was mine for two years. Two years.”
“She wasn’t yours,” he snapped. “You took her. There’s a difference.”
“She was mine! I took her in. I cared for her. I tucked that little girl in every night, and I’ve thought about her every day since. I love her.”
“Then prove it.”
Izzy hiccupped a breath and asked, “How do you expect me to do that?”
“Tell me what happened the night you found her,” he said.
“Why?” she hissed suspiciously. “So you can add more years to my sentence?”
“I couldn’t care less about your sentence, Ms. Lane,” he growled under his breath. “You can rot in here for all I care. What matters to me is that young lady over there, whose life is in danger. If you love her as much as you say you do, then help me keep her safe.”
“I don’t talk to cops,” she said coldly. “But I’ll tell Holly whatever she wants to know. Convince her to talk to me again.”
Marx sighed. “I won’t do that.”
I exhaled slowly and cleared my expression before I pushed away from the wall. I had come here for a purpose, and I needed to finish what I’d started. I didn’t spend eight torturous hours in a car so we could leave with nothing because I couldn’t control my emotions.
I walked back to the table, and Izzy looked up at me with unguarded hope and desperation in her face. Marx was leaning on the table across from her so that he was at her eye level, and he straightened at my approach.
“You don’t have to talk to her, Holly.”
“I do.” I gave him a small, tight smile to let him know this was my choice and nothing he could say would change my mind. “I’ll stay as long as she answers our questions.”