by D. L. Wood
This was the master, and obviously the room Chris used. The bed was unmade, a navy towel hung over a side chair, and a pair of running shoes lay discarded on the rug. She walked straight through to the master bath, and after first unsuccessfully searching under the sink, she found a box of bandages and peroxide on a shelf in the linen closet.
The cut was beginning to ache, even more so as she ran cold water over it, then peroxide to clean it. Selecting the largest of the bandages, she gingerly pulled off her mother’s wedding band—she’d been wearing it since the funeral—and awkwardly wrapped the bandage around the two-inch wound. It wasn’t pretty—the sticky-side of the bandage had stuck to itself in places, so the end result wasn’t smooth—but at least it was tight and contained the bleeding.
Crestfallen, she examined the towel. This man had supported her unwaveringly, even made her dinner for goodness’ sake, then she had gone and hurt his feelings, ruined his towel, and let the bread burn.
I’m the worst.
She rinsed as much blood out of the towel as she could and left it to soak in the sink, picked her ring up off the counter and walked back into the bedroom, headed for the kitchen. Hoping to force the ring back over the bandage so she wouldn’t misplace it, she started to slide it on—and dropped it.
“No!” she exclaimed, unsuccessfully scrabbling for it as it hit the wood floor and rolled noisily across it, disappearing beneath the queen-sized bed that was pushed against the wall opposite the door. “Seriously!” she exclaimed, huffing as she dropped to her knees and lifted the grey, box-pleated bed skirt to peer beneath it.
Nothing. She flicked the overhead light on, then crawled down to look again, tucking the bed skirt under the mattress to allow light to better spill into the space. No ring. A stack of several books, a clear plastic bin of shoes, a longer clear bin with sweaters, and a lot of dust. But no ring.
Must’ve rolled somewhere behind all that.
Trying not to imagine what Chris would think if he walked in and found her there, she hurriedly dragged out both bins and the pile of books. Ducking under again, she finally spotted the ring, lying as far back as possible, against the baseboard near the leg at the head of the bed frame. Slithering beneath the box spring, she stretched out, clasped her fingers around the gold piece, then scooted back out.
With a very intentional, steady hand, she slid the ring down her finger and over the bandage. It was a little too tight, but at least it wasn’t going anywhere. She sighed, still sitting on the floor, her mouth turning down as she noticed the dust bunnies scattered across her blouse. After brushing them off as best she could, she pushed the bins back under the bed, then the books—old textbooks by the look of them—until she picked up the last one and stopped.
It was a photograph album, the 8 x 10 sort, leather bound and quite full.
I shouldn’t look.
But, baby pictures…come on. Maybe Chris in elementary—or high school? She smiled at the thought of what he must have looked like back then. Was he a handsome jock or a bit of an awkward geek like her?
A quick peek couldn’t hurt.
She flipped the first page open. Yep, they were baby pictures, adhered to the sticky pages of the album and protected by a clear plastic overlay. A fat, dark-haired baby with ruddy cheeks and curls. She could see the promise of Chris’s adult features in the toddler’s pudge. A woman snuggled him close.
His mother? Probably.
There were several other photos like it, but none depicting a father figure. She turned the next page to find elementary school photos, Chris with missing teeth, one with Santa. She turned more pages, revealing lots and lots of photos with his mother: at home, during holidays, dressed up, but still no father. They must be close, she thought. Or must have been, if she’s not alive. She suddenly felt rather selfish, realizing that she had been so consumed with herself over the last few days, she had never asked about Chris’s family.
Junior high and high school photos followed, including pictures from a few dances—one of Chris with a girl on his arm, posing beneath a “Homecoming 1996” banner. Then Chris in a basketball uniform, and action shots taken mid-play.
Another page. A photo of a teenaged girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, stared out at Dani. It had been taken from a distance, when the girl wasn’t looking at the camera. She was pretty, slight, with a fair complexion and the hint of a smile as she stared off somewhere to the right of the frame. There were other similar photos—the girl at a restaurant, at a football game, in a school hallway.
Maybe she was his girlfriend? But there were no pictures of them together.
Maybe she was someone he wished had been his girlfriend, but who had not felt the same way. Dani had a friend like that in college. The boy had been a dear friend to her, but wanted a different kind of relationship, having feelings she did not reciprocate. The girl and Chris must have at least been friends, because at the bottom of the right page, beneath the clear overlay that protected the photos was a movie stub, dated December 17, 1994, for Miracle on 34th Street, from the Archway Theater Movieplex in St. Louis. It was sweet, really, that he had kept this. Teen crushes were so fervent and consuming. She had had her own in Bailey King—which apparently, to her surprise, still had legs—and even had a few keepsakes of her own from those days: a dried corsage and a score card from their first date at putt-putt golf—now both packed away in one of the “Me” boxes.
Her gaze trailed down the page, coming to rest on something below the photos at the bottom: a few short strands of hair, blond by the looks of it, wrapped together by a folded piece of clear tape.
A chill rippled across Dani’s skin, but she knew why and dismissed it. They had just been talking about the lock of Jennifer’s hair found with Rheardon’s things. This little keepsake of Chris’s just hit too close to home, that’s all. An odd coincidence, at the wrong time.
Still, she thought, it’s a bit creepy. Had the girl given it to him? Had he playfully pulled it from her when she wasn’t looking or found it on her brush or jacket? There were legitimate explanations, but still, her nerves tingled uneasily. All of it together—the voyeuristic nature of the photos, the single movie stub, the hair—suggested to the detective in her that there may have been an unhealthy obsession at work.
She turned the page and, thankfully, found no more pictures of the girl, but rather a plethora of family ones. Chris with his mother at an amusement park and on the beach, laughing as a wave hit them. A few older people, presumably grandparents, at a birthday party, with Chris helping an elderly man blow out candles. And in the top right, one of Chris, sandwiched between a man and woman standing on the porch of a white house with green shutters—
Dani gasped.
I know that house.
I know those people.
This was the caretakers’ house at the rear of Dr. Beecher’s property. The Pitts’ house. And those people, the man and the woman…they were Mr. and Mrs. Pitts.
Why was Chris in a photo with these people? He had never mentioned anything about them. Not in all the time they’d been talking about the case—
Dani ripped back the plastic overlay, peeled the photo from the sticky page beneath, and flipped it over.
Chris, Uncle Rodney and Aunt Marla, June ’95.
Dani released the photo as if it had burned her, letting it fall to the page where it landed right-side up. Nausea swelled in her gut, her heart thundering as the meaning of those written words sank in.
Uncle Rodney. Aunt Marla. June ’95.
He didn’t just know them. He was related to them. And he had been there that summer. With the Pitts. In that house. On that property. Where she found Jennifer…
Jennifer.
But he had never said one word.
You know why.
Dani wanted to vomit, pass out, scream—a roaring filled her ears, making it difficult to think as she sucked in breath after breath, her lungs heaving, her chest on fire. Why couldn’t she breathe? Why couldn’t she get enoug
h air?
Because the migrant worker wasn’t a migrant worker at all. It was their nephew, Chris.
She flung the next page over and her heart all but stopped.
On the left side was a newspaper clipping from the Skye Gazette, dated July 10, 1995. The article’s headline read, “Local Girl Murdered,” and included Jennifer’s sophomore yearbook photo—Jennifer, with her wavy blond hair and happy blue eyes, smiling out at Dani, oblivious to the tragic destiny racing toward her.
Dani’s gaze drifted down over the photo and story, to the bottom right corner of the page.
There, tucked protectively beneath the clear plastic, taped into place so as not to slip out, was a small, silver band of twisted vines.
Then the world went black.
25
Musty, dank earth. Rotting wood and wet decay. And…the taste of blood. She licked her lips, her tongue seeking out the wetness.
I’m bleeding. Why am I bleeding?
Dani blinked. It was so dark, everything in shades of black and brown and grey. It had to be late. How much time had passed?
And where am I?
Her brain was mud and a vicious ache pounded at the back of her head, rippling out to consume her entire skull. She shut her eyes tightly against it, then blinked again several times. She was facing a wall. And lying on the floor. A wood floor, but not smooth and polished like Chris’s condo.
Chris.
His name was a shot of adrenaline, cutting through the murkiness, the words of her academy instructor flying back to her: “Control the situation or the situation will control you.”
Assess the situation, Danielle.
She was on the floor, face toward the wall, her hands free. She was bleeding from the mouth and, given the monster headache, probably from her head too.
Get up. Now!
She rolled over and scrambled to her feet, and though all was shrouded in shadow, she knew immediately where she was.
The shed. In the very same corner where she used to hide as a child. And in the diagonally opposite corner, barely illuminated by the faint moonlight dripping through the sparse holes in the roof, stood Chris.
“Don’t try anything. I’m armed and you’re not.” His voice was different. Broken, somehow. She strained to see where his weapon was—held or tucked somewhere—but couldn’t make it out. “You’ve been asleep for hours,” he said. “You’re pretty when you sleep.”
“What…happened, Chris?” A drop of blood trailed down her lip and her hand flew to it, the spot stinging at her touch.
“You hit your face on the corner of the bed frame when you fell.” He wiped at his own mouth, as if he were the one bleeding, not her. “Didn’t mean for that to happen.”
The gnawing ache at the back of her head, somewhere high above her left ear, intensified. She reached a hand to it, finding her hair a moist, matted nest. She pulled her hand back, the blood on it black in the darkness.
“How did we get here?”
He sighed and the sound was beyond sad; it was bereft. A lament, thick with great loss. “This could have been so perfect.”
She forced herself to think, to process his words. “What are you talking about?” she asked, backing farther into the corner, pressing herself against the wall.
“You’re the last person I would have expected to violate someone’s privacy,” he said, raw disappointment twisting his features.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to. I just…I needed a bandage.” She splayed her wounded hand out so he could see it. “And then my ring rolled under the bed and I found the album. I was just curious about the photos—you know, what you looked like when you were younger—”
“You wanted…you were interested in me?” Squinting, she could make out that his expression had shifted. Eased. What she had said had pleased him.
“Of course, Chris.” She worked to keep her tone gentle, warm—though every muscle in her body was aching to let loose a war-cry and take a run at him. “I wasn’t snooping. I just…happened on it.”
He exhaled wearily.
“Chris, what happened? How did I get here?”
“You don’t remember?” he asked quietly.
Dani shook her head. It hurt, and she ceased mid-shake.
“I found you looking at the album. Looking at her page. You shouldn’t have been.” His voice modulated, adopting a far-off, dreamy quality. “You ruined everything, Boston. It could have been so perfect…”
“Chris—”
The sound of his name seemed to bring him back to himself and, as if rattling off a list of meaningless errands he’d undertaken, he spouted, “I hit you to stop you. You fell. When you woke up, you were dazed. I needed to get you out, so I waited awhile, then took you to my car, and drove here. I had to carry you from the car, though. You passed out again by the time we got here.”
Bits and pieces of it flashed in Dani’s mind. Coming to on his bedroom floor, the cold wood against her cheek. Stumbling to his car, his arm around her waist, holding her up. The dizziness. Falling into his back seat. “People will have seen,” she said.
“I doubt it. I didn’t leave until after midnight and you were mobile, just unstable. It looked like you were drunk. And that’s what I’ll tell them. That you drank too much, and I drove you home. Tomorrow, when you don’t come back for your car, I’ll call you, and eventually get Sasha involved.”
“You’ll be a suspect. You’ll be the last person to have seen me.”
“You’ve had break-ins, remember? Someone is after you. They’ll be the target, not me.”
“But my blood is at your place.”
“And you cut your hand. Easily explained,” he countered.
No. Not easily explained. It was a terrible plan with a million holes in it that she could see, even in her dazed state. But he was apparently blind to them and continued confidently laying out his scheme.
“I’ll say we were looking at old photos in my bedroom and you split your hand open again. I’ll have to take their photos and keepsakes out of the album first, but that’s easy enough.”
The ring in the album. “You have Jennifer’s ring, Chris.”
His face dropped. “I needed to keep it. I needed it to keep her close. Just like her lock of hair. But I had to leave that at Rheardon’s. The ring is all I have now.”
You have to keep him talking, her training whispered to her. Get it all out.
“Tell me, Chris. Tell me what happened to Jennifer. Please.”
A shadow, darker than the ones cloaking the space fell across his countenance. “She was so very disappointing. She ruined everything. Just like you.”
He was all over the place. She had to corral him, guide him.
“Chris—the photo with your aunt and uncle. You came from St. Louis to stay with them that summer?”
“As soon as school was out. I didn’t want to come. I wanted to stay home with my mom. But she made me come.”
“Why?”
“Because of her.” For several beats he looked up at the roof, as if trying to see the sky through one of the holes. Then his gaze fell back on Dani. “You saw her. In the album.”
The girl in the pictures. Dani nodded. “Who is she?”
“Kayla.”
“Why did you have to leave because of Kayla?”
“She was so beautiful.” His eyelids fell and a strange, almost angelic peace settled in his features as he focused on whatever images he was conjuring. “Flowing blond hair—nearly white it was so blond—and her eyes…” He opened his, focusing on Dani again. “They were blue. Big and blue. So big you could get lost in them.”
Suddenly his body went rigid, the illusion of peace shattered, his voice now somewhat robotic. “I had to leave because Mom knew. I’d told her how I felt about Kayla. We used to tell each other everything. She helped me work up the nerve to speak to Kayla and ask her out. It was just a stupid dance, but Kayla laughed at me and…” He trailed off, shame clouding his gaze. “Mo
m caught me crying about it and I told her what Kayla had done. How she laughed…I shouldn’t have, I shouldn’t have told her anything but I couldn’t help it. So when they found her, Mom knew.”
When they found her. Ice cold fear swirled inside Dani. “Chris,” she said, her heart pounding against her ribs. “What did your mom know?”
His brow furrowed. “That I’d killed her, of course.” He snorted. “Come on, you’re sharper than that, Boston.”
For a second, he sounded like the Chris that had shown up at her house with a supreme pizza and laughed with her about foul-ups on the job. But that Chris had never really existed. It had always been this Chris in disguise. The one with an album under his bed that contained photographs of two dead girls, stolen strands of hair and a ring of twisted vines taken from the corpse of her friend.
“Mom never said it outright, but she knew,” he plowed on. “She’d seen the pictures and the hair—you saw the hair, right?”
Without stopping to think about whether she should or not, Dani nodded.
“Mom was afraid. Afraid someone would figure it out. So she sent me away.” His voice grew sour. “I didn’t want to go. I wanted to be near Kayla. I wanted to go to her funeral and touch her one last time before they put her in the ground.” He gingerly ran a finger in midair along a surface that wasn’t there. “I wanted to tell her I still loved her. Whisper it over her…but Mom sent me here and I never got the chance.”
“She sent you to stay with the Pitts?”
He nodded. “Mom’s sister and her husband.”
“But, Chris, how is it that no one ever saw you? I never saw you and I rode my bike through there all the time—”
“They didn’t want anyone to see me. So I stayed in the back fields, mostly. Didn’t want any questions about me or why I was there. Mom was terrified that if I stayed in St. Louis, I’d do something that would draw attention to myself in the investigation. But she was also paranoid that my absence from St. Louis might be a red flag—apparently the police were interviewing everyone who knew Kayla. Even though we were in the same grade, I didn’t ‘know’ her that way. And Kayla never got a chance to tell anyone that I had asked her out and she’d turned me down. So unless they had a reason to suspect me—like me skipping town—the cops wouldn’t even look at me.