Pieces of Her

by Karin Slaughter

She turned to look at him. “Keep that in mind if you ever consider asking her out on a date.”

  The door opened.

  “Mom—” Andy rushed into Laura’s arms.

  “I’m fine.” Laura willed it to be true. “Just a little shaken.”

  “She was great.” Mike winked at Laura, as if they were in this together. “She worked him like Tyson. The boxer, not the chicken.”

  Andy grinned.

  Laura looked away. She could not abide seeing pieces of Nick in her child.

  She told Mike, “I need to get out of here.”

  He waved for the guard. Laura almost tripped over the man’s shoes as they exited back through security. She waited for Andy to get her purse out of the locker, her phone and keys.

  “I’ve been thinking about something,” Mike said, because he was incapable of being silent. “The old Nickster didn’t know you already confessed to transporting the gun to Oslo, right? That’s why you got two years in the slammer. The judge sealed that part of your immunity agreement. He didn’t want to exacerbate international tensions. If the Germans found out an American smuggled a gun from West to East for the purposes of murder, there would’ve been hell to pay.”

  Laura took her purse from Andy. She checked to make sure her wallet was inside.

  Mike said, “So, when you told Nick that stuff about the gun, he thought you were implicating yourself. But you weren’t.”

  Laura said, “Thank you, Michael, for narrating back to me exactly what just happened.” She shook his hand. “We’ve got it from here. I know you have a lot of work to do.”

  “Sure. I thought I’d scrapbook through some of my feelings, maybe open a pinot.” He winked at Laura as he held out his hand to Andy. “Always a pleasure, beautiful.”

  Laura wasn’t going to watch her daughter flirt with a pig. She followed the guard to the last set of doors. Finally, blissfully, she was outside, where there were no more locks and bars.

  Laura took a deep breath of fresh air, holding it in her lungs until they felt like they might burst. The bright sunlight brought tears into her eyes. She wanted to be on the beach drinking tea, reading a book and watching her daughter play in the waves.

  Andy looped her hand through Laura’s arm. “Ready?”

  “Will you drive?”

  “You hate when I drive. It makes you nervous.”

  “You can get used to anything.” Laura climbed into the car. Her leg was still sore from the shrapnel in the diner. She looked up at the prison. There were no windows on this side of the building, but part of her could not shake the feeling that Nick was watching.

  In truth, she’d had that feeling for over thirty years.

  Andy backed out of the parking space. She drove through the gate. Laura didn’t let herself relax until they were finally on the highway. Andy’s driving had improved on her interminable road trip. Laura only gasped every twenty minutes instead of every ten.

  Laura said, “That part about loving Gordon, I meant it. He was the best thing that ever happened to me. Other than you. And I didn’t know what I had.”

  Andy nodded, but the little girl who prayed for her parents to get back together was gone.

  Laura asked, “Are you all right, sweetheart? Was it okay hearing his voice, or—”

  “Mom.” Andy checked the mirror before passing a slow-moving truck. She leaned her elbow on the door. She pressed her fingers against the side of her head.

  Laura watched the trees blur past. Pieces of her conversation with Nick kept coming into her mind, but she would not let herself dwell on what was said. If there was one thing Laura had learned, it was that she had to keep moving forward. If she ever stopped, Nick would catch up with her.

  Andy said, “You talk like him.” When Laura didn’t answer, she said, “He calls you darling and my love, just like you call me.”

  “I don’t talk like him. He talks like my mother.” She stroked back Andy’s hair so she could see her face. “Those were the words she used with me. They always made me feel loved. I wasn’t going to let Nick keep me from using the same words with you.”

  “‘She always knew where the tops to her Tupperware were,’” Andy quoted, one of the few things Laura could come up with to capture the essence of her mother.

  Now, she told Andy, “It’s more like she knew which china set was from the Queller side and where the Logan silverware was cast and all the other unimportant things she felt gave her control over her life.” Laura said something that she’d only recently realized was the truth: “My mother was as much a victim of my father as the rest of us.”

  “She was an adult.”

  “She wasn’t raised to be an adult. She was raised to be a rich man’s wife.”

  Andy seemed to mull over the distinction. Laura thought she was finished asking questions, but then she said, “What did you say to Paula when she was dying?”

  Laura had dreaded being asked about Paula for so long that she needed a moment to prepare. “Why are you asking now? It’s been over a month.”

  Andy’s shoulder went up in a shrug. Instead of going into one of her protracted silences, she said, “I wasn’t sure you would tell me the truth.”

  Laura didn’t acknowledge the point, which she proved by saying, “It was a variation of what I told Nick. That I would see her in hell.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” Laura wasn’t sure why her last words to Paula made it on the long list of pieces of herself that she still kept hidden from Andy. Perhaps she did not want to test the boundaries of her daughter’s newfound moral ambiguity. Telling a crazy woman with a razorblade lodged in her throat Nick is never going to fuck you now seemed jealous and petty.

  Which was probably why Laura had said it.

  She asked Andy, “Does what I did to Paula bother you?”

  Andy shrugged again. “She was a bad person. I mean—I guess you could break it down and say that she was still a human being and maybe there was another way to do it, but it’s easy to say that when it’s not your own life in danger.”

  Your life, Laura wanted to say, because she had known when she hid the razorblade inside her bandaged hand that she was going to kill Paula Evans for hurting her daughter.

  Andy asked, “Back in the prison, when you were walking away, why didn’t you tell him about the earbuds? That everything he said in your ear was recorded? Like, a final fuck you.”

  “I said what I needed to say,” Laura told her, though with Nick, she was never sure of herself. It felt so good to say those things to his face. Now that she was away from him, she had doubts.

  The yo-yo snapping back again.

  Andy seemed content to end the conversation there. She turned on the radio. She scanned the stations.

  Laura asked, “Did you like the song I played?”

  “I guess. It’s kind of old.”

  Laura put her hand to her heart, wounded. “I’ll learn something else. Name it.”

  “How about ‘Filthy’?”

  “How about something that’s actually music?”

  Andy rolled her eyes. She punched at the buttons on the tuner, likely searching for a sound that had the depth of cotton candy. “I’m sorry about your brother.”

  Laura closed her eyes against the sudden tears.

  “You did right by him,” Andy said. “You stood up for him. That took a lot.”

  Laura found a tissue and dried her eyes. She still couldn’t come to terms with what had happened. “I never left his side. Even when we were negotiating the deal with the FBI.”

  Andy stopped fiddling with the radio.

  Laura said, “Andrew died about ten minutes after the plea agreement was signed. It was very peaceful. I was holding his hand. I got to say goodbye to him.”

  Andy sniffed back tears. She had always been sensitive to Laura’s moods. “He stayed around long enough to make sure you were going to be okay.”

  She stroked Andy’s hair behind her ear again. “That’s what I like to thi
nk.”

  Andy wiped her eyes. She left the radio alone as she drove down the near-empty interstate. She was clearly thinking about something, but just as clearly content to keep her thoughts to herself.

  Laura rested her head back against the seat. She watched the trees blur by. She tried to enjoy the comfortable silence. Not a night had gone by since Andy had returned home without Laura waking up in a cold sweat. She wasn’t suffering post-traumatic stress or worrying about Andy’s safety. She had been terrified of seeing Nick again. That the trick with the piano and the earbuds would not work. That he would not walk into the open trap. That she would walk blindly into one of his.

  She hated him too much.

  That was the problem.

  You didn’t hate someone unless part of you still loved them. From the beginning, the two extremes had always been laced into their DNA.

  For six years, even while she’d loved him, part of Laura had hated Nick in that childish way that you hate something you can’t control. He was headstrong, and stupid, and handsome, which gave him cover for a hell of a lot of the mistakes he continually made—the same mistakes, over and over again, because why try new ones when the old ones worked so well in his favor?

  He was charming, too. That was the problem. He would charm her. He would make her furious. Then he would charm her back again so that she did not know if Nick was the snake or if she was the snake and Nick was the handler.

  The yo-yo snapping back into the palm of his hand.

  So Nick sailed along on his charm, and his fury, and he hurt people, and he found new things that interested him more, and the old things were left broken in his wake.

  Jane had been one of those broken, discarded things. Nick had sent her away to Berlin because he was tired of her. At first, she had enjoyed her freedom, but then she had panicked that he might not want her back. She had begged and pleaded with him and done everything she could think of to get his attention.

  Then Oslo had happened.

  Then her father was dead and Laura Juneau was dead and then, quite suddenly, Nick’s charm had stopped working. A trolley car off the tracks. A train without a conductor. The mistakes could not be forgiven, and eventually, the second same mistake would not be overlooked, and the third same mistake had dire consequences that had ended with Alexandra Maplecroft’s life being taken, a death sentence being passed on Andrew, then—almost—resulted in the loss of another life, her life, in the farmhouse bathroom.

  Inexplicably, Laura had still loved him. Perhaps loved him even more.

  Nick had let her live—that was what she kept telling herself while she went mad inside of her jail cell. He had left Paula at the farmhouse to guard her. He had planned to come back for her. To take her to their much-dreamed-of little flat in Switzerland, a country that had no extradition treaty with the US.

  Which had given her a delirious kind of hope.

  Andrew was dead and Jasper was gone and Laura had stared up at the jailhouse ceiling, tears running down her face, her neck still throbbing, her bruises still healing, her belly swelling with his child, and desperately loved him.

  Clayton Morrow. Nicholas Harp. In her misery, she did not care.

  Why was she so stupid?

  How could she still love someone who had tried to destroy her?

  When Laura had been with Nick—and she was decidedly with him during his long fall from grace—they had raged against the system that had so irrevocably exploited Andrew, and Robert Juneau, and Paula Evans, and William Johnson, and Clara Bellamy, and all the other members who eventually comprised their little army: The group homes. The emergency departments. The loony bin. The mental hospital. The squalor. The staff who neglected their patients. The orderlies who ratcheted tight the straightjackets. The nurses who looked the other way. The doctors who doled out the pills. The urine on the floor. The feces on the walls. The inmates, the fellow prisoners, taunting, wanting, beating, biting.

  The spark of rage, not the injustice, was what had excited Nick the most. The novelty of a new cause. The chance to annihilate. The dangerous game. The threat of violence. The promise of fame. Their names in lights. Their righteous deeds on the tongues of schoolchildren who were taught the lessons of change.

  A penny, a nickel, a dime, a quarter, a dollar bill . . .

  In the end, their deeds became part of the public record, but not in the way Nick had promised. Jane Queller’s sworn testimony laid out the plan from concept to demise. The training. The rehearsals. The drills. Jane had forgotten who’d first had the idea, but as with everything else, the plan had spread from Nick to all of them, a raging wildfire that would, in the end, consume every single one of their lives.

  What Jane had kept hidden, the one sin that she could never confess to, was that she had ignited that first spark.

  Dye packs.

  That was what they had all agreed would be in the paper bag. This was the Oslo plan: That Martin Queller would be stained with the proverbial blood of his victims on the world stage. Paula’s cell had infiltrated the manufacturer outside of Chicago. Nick had given the packs to Jane when she had arrived in Oslo.

  As soon as he was gone, Jane had thrown them into the trash.

  It had all started with a joke—not a joke on Jane’s part, but a joke made by Laura Juneau. Andrew had relayed it in one of his coded letters to Berlin:

  Poor Laura told me that she would just as soon find a gun in the bag as a dye pack. She has a recurring fantasy of killing Father with a revolver like the one her husband used to murder their children, then turning the gun on herself.

  No one, not even Andrew, had known that Jane had decided to take the joke seriously. She’d bought the revolver off a German biker in the dive bar, the same dive bar that Nick had sent her to when she’d first arrived in Berlin. The one where Jane was afraid that she would be gang-raped. The one that she had stayed at for exactly one hour because Nick had told her he would know if she left a minute sooner.

  For over a week, Jane had left the gun on the counter of her studio apartment, hoping it would be stolen. She had decided not to take it to Oslo, and then she had taken it to Oslo. She had decided to leave it in her hotel room, and then she had taken it from her room. And then she was carrying it in a brown paper bag to the ladies room. And then she was taping it behind the toilet tank like a scene from The Godfather. And then she was sitting on the front row, watching her father pontificate on stage, praying to God that Laura Juneau would not follow through on her fantasy.

  And also praying that she would.

  Nick had always been drawn to new and exciting things. Nothing bored him more than the predictable. Jane had hated her father, but she had been motivated by much more than vengeance. She was desperate to have Nick’s attention, to prove that she belonged by his side. She had desperately hoped that the violent shock of helping Laura Juneau commit murder would make Nick love her again.

  And it had worked. But then it hadn’t.

  And Jane was crushed by guilt. But then Nick had talked her out of it.

  And Jane persuaded herself that it all would’ve happened the same way without the gun.

  But then she wondered . . .

  Which was the typical pattern of their six years together. The push and pull. The vortex. The yo-yo. The rollercoaster. She worshipped him. She despised him. He was her weakness. He was her destroyer. Her ultimate all or none. There were so many ways to describe that tiny piece of herself that Nick could always nudge into insanity.

  Laura had only ever been able to pull herself back for the sake of other people.

  First for Andrew, then for Andrea.

  That was the real reason she had gone to the prison today: not to punish Nick, but to push him away. To keep him locked up so that she could be free.

  Laura had always believed—vehemently, with great conviction—that the only way to change the world was to destroy it.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks very much to my editor, Kate Elton, and my team
at Victoria Sanders and Associates, including but not limited to Victoria Sanders, Diane Dickensheid, Bernadette Baker-Baughman and Jessica Spivey. There are so many folks at HarperCollins International and Morrow who should be thanked: Liate Stehlik, Heidi Richter-Ginger, Kaitlin Harri, Chantal Restivo-Alessi, Samantha Hagerbaumer and Julianna Wojcik. Also a big hats off to all the fantastic divisions I visited last year and the folks I got to spend time with in Miami. I also want to include Eric Rayman on the team roster—thank you for all you do.

  Writing this book took me down many different research paths, some of which did not end up being incorporated into the book, but I have a list of folks who were crucial to helping me capture certain moods and feelings. My good friend and fellow author Sara Blaedel put me in contact with Anne Mette Goddokken and Elisabeth Alminde for some Norwegian background. Another fantastic author and friend, Regula Venske, spoke to me about Germany; I so regret that only one percent of our fascinating conversation in Düsseldorf made it into the narrative. Elise Diffie gave me some help with cultural touchstones. I am very grateful to both Brandon Bush and Martin Kearns for offering insight into the life of a professional pianist. A very heartfelt thank you goes to Sal Towse and Burt Kendall, my dear friends and resident San Francisco experts.

  Sarah Ives and Lisa Palazzolo won the “have your name appear in the next book” contests. Adam Humphrey, I hope you’re enjoying all the winning.

  To my daddy—thank you so much for taking care of me while I’m in the throes of writing and trying to navigate life. Best for last to DA, my heart, for being nobody, too.

  Two girls are forced into the woods at gunpoint.

  One runs for her life. One is left behind . . .

  Twenty-eight years ago, Charlotte and Samantha Quinn’s happy small-town family life was torn apart by a terrifying attack on their family home. It left their mother dead. It left their father — Pikeville’s notorious defence attorney — devastated. And it left the family fractured beyond repair, consumed by secrets from that terrible night.

  Twenty-eight years later, Charlie has followed in her father’s footsteps to become a lawyer herself — the archetypal good daughter. But when violence comes to Pikeville again and a shocking tragedy leaves the whole town traumatised, Charlie is plunged into a nightmare. Not only is she the first witness on the scene, but it’s a case which can’t help triggering the terrible memories she’s spent so long trying to suppress. Because the shocking truth about the crime which destroyed her family nearly thirty years ago won’t stay buried forever . . .