The nondescript music and cheap fabric and saleswomen with thick eye shadow distracted her so that she didn’t realize something was wrong until she was almost right next to her aunt.
“Hey.” Trudy nudged her shoulder, and Charlotte whirled on her, pupils dilated and face devoid of color.
“Ruby,” Charlotte gasped, the tips of her fingers digging into the exposed flesh of Trudy’s arms.
The undiluted panic on her aunt’s face, in her voice, cut through any lingering confusion. Something was wrong. So very wrong.
“Where is she?” Trudy asked, the fear turning her voice sharp enough to cut through Charlotte’s hysteria. “Charlotte.”
“She’s gone.” Charlotte breathed the words out on an exhale, and though they’d just confirmed what Trudy had suspected, they still lodged themselves somewhere in her windpipe so that it was almost impossible to breathe. The ice-cream cup spattered against the tile, and the cool, melted liquid slinked into the spaces between Trudy’s toes.
“Charlotte.” She forced the name out. Concentrating on the points of Charlotte’s fingers where they pushed bruises into Trudy’s skin helped her focus. “She’s not gone. She’s just lost. I’m sure she wandered off. You know her.”
Giving in to the fear right now would be fatal. She needed Charlotte with her, not useless on the floor, which was where she was currently headed.
She snaked a hand up to the vulnerable skin of Charlotte’s inner arm and pinched hard, pulling up and twisting, almost drawing blood. The mark she left behind was red and pulsing, and Charlotte flinched. But her eyes lost some of their glassiness.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Trudy said. There was a clock in her head, white and black and simple, and it was counting each second that Ruby was missing. “You’re going to take this half. I’m going to take the other and then work my way toward the toy section. She’ll find it if she can.”
Trudy pushed Charlotte’s arms out of the way and grabbed for her purse, palming the weight of her aunt’s cell phone. She held it up in front of Charlotte’s face. “You’re going to call me the second you find her, and I’ll do the same. Keep this out.”
She pushed the phone into Charlotte’s lax fingers and then took off without waiting for a response. If her aunt was going to go catatonic on her, that left only Trudy to find Ruby.
“Would you like to try Sweet . . .”
Trudy turned toward the voice, only to find one of the perfume ladies with an intricate pink bottle clutched in one hand and an empty smile approaching her, ready to spray. Knocking the perfume out of the way, Trudy grabbed her shoulders. The plastic mask faltered, her eyes going wide.
“My baby has gone missing,” Trudy said, not willing to waste time on the complexities of the relationship. “Go find an intercom and make an announcement. She’s five and has curly red hair.”
Again, she didn’t wait for confirmation before jogging a few steps back and spinning, her eyes at knee level, searching for familiar pigtails.
Ruby was fine. She was probably just hiding. She wandered off like she always did, and Charlotte had never learned how to actually keep an eye on her. Trudy repeated the loop of reassurances, turning up the volume on it to be heard over the rush of blood past her eardrums. Ruby was fine.
But the seconds kept slipping by, one into the next, and her hands tore at racks of clothing and at pretty purses and pillows fluffed on beds, and still no Ruby. Her breathing had turned shallow minutes, hours, days ago, and there were spots popping at the edges of her vision. Her phone remained stubborn and silent in her hand despite her desperate inner pleas for it to ring, for Charlotte to laugh in her ear no matter how manic that laugh might be, and they’d yell at Ruby and squeeze her at the same time until she tried to squirm away.
But still nothing.
It wasn’t until she’d finally admitted to herself that Ruby wasn’t in the toy section that her phone buzzed.
Got her. Dresses.
She’d thought she’d feel relief, but she didn’t. She didn’t feel anything but an emptiness that was left behind from the waves of fear that had kept her upright for the past fifteen minutes.
Trudy found them sitting on the dirty linoleum floor in the middle of an aisle, surrounded by dresses that had angry red sales stickers hanging from their arms. Charlotte’s face was buried in Ruby’s hair, and the girl’s arms were tight around her mother’s back.
A movement caught Trudy’s peripheral vision, and she tilted her head just a bit, still keeping her family in sight. There was a woman, tall and slim with brown hair, walking away from their group, her long legs swift and confident. Just as she turned the corner at the end of the aisle, she dipped her chin to her shoulder for one last glance at the scene. Then she was gone.
“Who was that?” Trudy asked. Neither Charlotte nor Ruby answered, and she doubted they’d even heard.
She dropped to a crouch, her hand shaking as she placed it between Ruby’s shoulders. “You scared us there, shortcake.”
Ruby burrowed her head deeper into her mother’s neck. Charlotte looked up at Trudy, the rims of her eyes red, her lashes thick, damp clumps. There was something bordering on a thank-you there in her expression, and Trudy hated it.
“I can’t believe you let this happen,” Trudy said, and the words burned like acid even as they formed in the soft spaces of her mouth. “God, you’re such a failure.”
Ruby stiffened underneath Trudy’s palm, and that only added to the guilt that was like sandpaper against an open wound.
Trudy straightened so she didn’t have to meet Charlotte’s now-blank expression, the flicker of gratitude doused by the unwarranted cruelty.
“Come on, petal.” Charlotte shifted her grip on her daughter so she didn’t have to let go of her as she stood. Trudy leaned down, cupping her elbow to help her, a silent penance that was nowhere near enough of an apology. But it was what she was capable of.
Adjusting Ruby so that most of her weight was supported by Charlotte’s hip, her aunt shifted so that she met Trudy’s eyes.
You’re such a failure.
There was an echo of her hateful words ricocheting in the space beneath her skull, and Trudy saw it there on Charlotte’s face as well. It would take a long time for that echo to go silent for either of them.
Finally—without dropping her gaze—Charlotte murmured, “I know.”
Later that night, Trudy waited for Charlotte on the porch, in the dark, for an hour. When Ruby had crawled into Trudy’s bed, her face damp with tears, Trudy had known that Charlotte had gone off to God-knows-where to ease the self-hatred that was slowly killing her. Trudy didn’t know if the solution was sex or drugs or alcohol for her aunt, but whatever it was, she was seeking it far away from anyone in the Burke household.
“Tell me a story,” Ruby had whispered into the nook of Trudy’s shoulder, and so Trudy did. It had taken only minutes for her breathing to even out as she snuffled a bit and rolled into a comfortable position. Only when she was confident Ruby was truly asleep had Trudy slipped out from beneath the comforter, her feet padding across the hardwood. She’d grabbed a cigarette she kept hidden in her birth control packet and had tucked it behind her ear. It wasn’t like she would be able to smoke it, but it would give her something to do with her hands.
Then she’d crept downstairs, making sure to gently close the screen door that liked to slam at the most inopportune of moments. When she’d been satisfied she hadn’t awoken the entire household, she’d settled onto the swinging bench that hung just off to the right of the stairs.
She pulled her legs up to her chest, then stretched her baggy, well-worn T-shirt out to cover her knees. It was cool enough to have goose bumps but not cool enough to go searching for a blanket.
And then she’d waited.
The night was always so quiet. Trudy liked to think they lived close enough to the ocean to hear the waves breaking, but it wasn’t true. It was just something she told herself, and she didn’t even kn
ow why. There were so many things like that.
Instead of lingering on the thought, she’d concentrated on the plan that had started as just a wisp of an idea earlier that day when Ruby had gone missing. They’d all been silent on the way home, crashing down from their fear, torn panty hose long forgotten. In the confines of the car, with her hand petting Ruby’s hair, Trudy had admitted they’d overreacted. The girl had simply wandered off and been found by a “nice lady” who helped Ruby locate Charlotte. But the terror was easy to ridicule in the moments after. Panic, however, knew nothing about rational thinking.
Trudy was also on edge. There were the passports she kept on her person at almost all times. There was Ruby’s birthday trudging ever closer, when Ruby would pass over an invisible line none of them dared mention. And then there was Charlotte, who seemed to be held together with cheap glue and frayed strings and perhaps a few promises to gods she didn’t believe in.
They were going to have to act, sooner rather than later, it seemed. Now she just had to get her aunt to trust her again. If she ever had trusted her.
When Charlotte crept back up the stairs, Trudy fell into old patterns, flinging mud at her just to see if it would stick. It was habit at this point.
“Do be sure to change out of that dress. There’s a stain on it that I don’t think can pass as holy water,” Trudy said. Christ, why couldn’t she stop being a bitch? For once in her life?
Her aunt didn’t react, just went for the doorknob.
And Trudy was about to miss her opportunity because she couldn’t keep the barbs that bit into her own soul to herself. She had to watch them slice into Charlotte’s skin as well, because only then was it justified in how much it hurt.
This, though—Ruby—was too important. It was so much bigger than either her or Charlotte, so much bigger than pettiness and anger and frustration. It was so much bigger than her pride.
Trudy swallowed hard. “Wait.”
Charlotte turned, slowly, so slowly, exhaustion in every collapsed angle of her body.
“I need your help.”
The laugh that came out of Charlotte was ugly and broken and spoke of the years of animosity that festered between them. “You’re asking for my help? After that little scene?”
Trudy winced. At herself. At her aunt. At their screwed-up situation. “Yeah.”
Still, it was that simple because she knew Charlotte. If Trudy asked for help, Charlotte would help.
Charlotte pressed the heel of her palm into the space between her eyes, but Trudy could tell she wasn’t going to ignore her and walk away. Looking up with those cool, judgmental eyes, Charlotte sighed. “What do you need?”
Where to start? “I don’t hate you, you know.” And that’s not what she had meant to say. She pressed her lips together, biting into the flesh as if it had betrayed her for letting that confession slip out.
This time Charlotte’s laugh was dry and brittle. Disbelieving. “I honestly don’t care if you do, Trudy.”
That wasn’t true. Charlotte cared, and she cared too much, which was part of the problem, wasn’t it?
“Ruby’s turning six,” Trudy tried, because that really was the start of it, wasn’t it? Ruby’s birthday and the ever-ticking clock as they moved closer to it.
Charlotte paled in the weak glow of the streetlamp. “I know.”
“What are you going to do?” Trudy asked, not hopeful. Charlotte had done nothing to protect the girl up until this point. Why would she suddenly start acting like a mother?
Her aunt shook her head, looking helpless as always. Rage, swift and fierce and familiar, shot through her.
“Why haven’t you taken her away yet?”
Charlotte’s eyes were wide and damp and scared. Haunted. Hunted. “He wouldn’t let me.”
“That’s bullshit.” Trudy wanted to yell it. Wished they were having this out, finally having this out, somewhere other than their front porch where anything over a whisper was dangerous. “Come on, Charlie. Do better than that.”
But her aunt was shaking her head. “You think he’d let me take her? She’s his daughter.”
Trudy blanched at the stark truth of it, her stomach heaving. No one ever said it out loud, though they all knew. She pushed to her feet and took the few steps necessary to lean over the railing. Her body rid itself of bile as if it could purge itself of every terrible thing in the world.
When Trudy was done, she straightened, wiping a hand across her mouth. Charlotte hadn’t moved, was still watching her with quiet, resigned eyes.
“We have to get her out,” Trudy said, surer than she’d been of anything in her life.
“I tried to leave when I was fourteen,” Charlotte said. “A friend of mine was going on vacation to Miami, and I lied and said Hollis and Sterling were letting me go with her family. Hollis was waiting for me when we got there—she’d flown ahead while we drove. She broke my wrist.”
Trudy swallowed hard. She hadn’t known. She’d never known Charlotte had tried to escape.
“I tried to leave again when I was sixteen,” Charlotte continued. “Mellie had gotten out that one time, just left in the middle of the night with Tommy. So I thought, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll take a bus to Vegas. I didn’t even care what would happen when I got there. All I wanted to do was leave.”
The choices you can live with.
“It took Hollis two weeks to track me down.” Hollis. Always Hollis. Sterling would never get his hands dirty. “We couldn’t leave for three days, though, because of how bruised my face was after she found me. When I tried to leave at eighteen. Well, that’s how we have Ruby.”
And with Ruby came complete control over Charlotte.
“Why?” It was too much, and Trudy could barely push the question out between trembling lips.
Charlotte’s laugh this time was hollow and desperate. “If I knew why . . .”
“Hollis hates you,” Trudy said, like it was a revelation, except it wasn’t. They all saw how Charlotte was treated. Even worse than Trudy.
“Hollis doesn’t hate me,” Charlotte corrected. “She hates herself.”
“She hates Sterling.”
Her aunt shrugged, one delicate shoulder. “I don’t know. I think it’s more complicated than that.” She paused, then continued, “I was the first, you know? Mellie. Well, he didn’t look at Mellie. But me? I used to think I was special. Our little secret.”
Whispered in the night. Trudy remembered the thrill of it. The idea of it. “Hollis should have tried to protect you.”
“She didn’t know.”
That wasn’t true. “She knows everything.”
“She didn’t want to believe it,” Charlotte conceded. “Denial is a powerful thing.”
It was almost surreal that they were talking about this. After all these years of silence and misdirected anger, here they were whispering on the porch at 5:00 a.m., ripping open old scars and pouring salt in the wounds.
“We have to get Ruby out,” Trudy said again.
“I know,” Charlotte said, but her voice was hesitant. “I just don’t know how. I’ve saved some money. I’ve been trying to come up with . . . something. I don’t know what to do, though.”
She sounded so young. Lost and unsure. Nothing like the poised Southern lady she portrayed to the public. And Trudy remembered in that moment that Charlotte was only twenty-four.
All of a sudden, Trudy was exhausted. Tired beyond anything she’d ever felt before. It was in her bones and her muscles and her limbs. But this was important.
“Well,” Trudy said, “lucky for you, I have a plan.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ALICE
August 3, 2018
Five days after the kidnapping
Alice stared at the address she’d just texted Charlotte, trying to consider her options. But the rage that swept through her, ruthless and uncontrolled, had died as sudden as it had come, leaving behind a thick fog that turned her thoughts sluggish.
Dam
age control. Think. Move.
The car would be too easy to spot. She would have to go on foot instead.
Alice took a breath, ignoring the shaking in her fingers. Then she started forward, across the parking lot. Once she got to the small plot of dirt on the other side, she slipped through the crack in between the fences lining the street and the station’s closest neighbor, a run-down Victorian that was the proverbial sore thumb of the area. She’d always liked it, and she liked it more when it provided her cover to move through the shin-high grass of its backyard into the alleyway on its far side.
She dipped into the shadow of one of the garages that lined the graveled road and scrolled through her contacts until she found the right number.
A little misdirection to keep the wolves at bay.
Ben Wilson answered on one ring. “Couldn’t get enough of me, could you?”
“You should run what you have on Zeke Durand,” she said, not bothering with foreplay.
There was a bit of shuffling on the other end, and when he spoke again, Ben’s voice was harder. More professional and less relaxed banter. “What do you have for me?”
She ran her hand through her hair, and the tips of her fingers caught in the knots. “Nothing.”
“Tease,” he said, and just like that, the easiness was back.
“Write it or don’t, I don’t care,” she snapped. “Consider this your heads-up.”
There was no guarantee that he’d run with it, but if he thought there was enough for her to call him, he might take a chance.
She didn’t wait for him to answer, just thumbed the power off completely and slipped the phone in her pocket before taking off at a slow jog. The diner was close, but she was going to be late. Even later since she planned on taking several wrong turns, ducking into side streets she knew led nowhere. It was paranoia at its finest, but her tolerance for sloppiness had plummeted in the past twenty minutes.
She knew she needed to get control of herself; she couldn’t risk another outburst like the one she’d just had at the station with Nakamura. There were too many eyes on her as it was, wanting her to fall apart, wanting her to break down. Just so they’d be right.
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