She really had to keep it together only for another day. Then she could fall apart, she could weep, she could scream, she could collapse to the floor, and she would be excused her hysterics. If there was any time it would be considered acceptable, it would be after Ruby disappeared.
The plan. The plan. The way Trudy said it was with the confidence she’d always had, because she had a beautiful face and a slim body and long full-moon hair that drew eyes wherever she went. She said it with the confidence she’d always had because she had a grandfather whose name was synonymous with power and had the money to back it up. She said it with the confidence she’d always had because she’d built a tough persona for herself to survive the abuse she’d been put through.
She said it as if both words were capitalized in her head. The Plan. When Trudy had hatched it a month ago, it had been nothing more than a frustrated desire to do something, anything, to stop the oncoming train they all saw barreling down on them.
It had morphed and changed and developed, which Trudy had been cagey about when pressed. Charlotte had the impression someone had helped her, but it didn’t seem important. What was important was that Ruby was going to be free. Free of this shitty life that Trudy and Charlotte had to live, and also free of her.
There was no doubt, no maybe, no but if. Charlotte was a terrible mother to her baby.
At first she’d hated her. The heartbeat. The flutter of movement on a black-and-gray screen. Then that same feeling, but beneath her belly. A foot kicking against her spleen. A thumb that was sucked even in the womb. Charlotte had hated her.
She’d had the kindest nurse the day she’d been able to find out the gender. The woman had blushed pink in happiness, all but crawling onto the table in her excitement.
“Do you want to know? Or be surprised?” she’d asked, with a teasing lilt in her voice that spoke to the fact that she had a secret. And a fun one.
“I don’t care,” Charlotte had said, and some of the light in the nurse had dimmed. She’d felt guilty for taking this joy from this stranger in a moment that held no joy for her. She’d plastered a fake smile on that looked genuine from years of practice. “I mean, yes. I’d love to know.”
It was a girl, the nurse gasped out with the enthusiasm of someone achieving a lifelong dream. Charlotte had wondered if the nurse had children of her own, if she wanted them. That had been her first thought after finding out she was carrying a girl.
Then there had come that day at the pool. Ruby was due in three weeks, and it had been unbearably hot and humid, so much so that the air was mostly water and every part of her hurt and her skin had felt stretched to breaking and her body had felt stretched to breaking and she’d just wanted it to end.
She slipped beneath the water, her fingers pressing up against the ledge to keep herself submerged. The air bubbles formed, stealing oxygen from her lungs and carrying it back up to the surface. Eventually there would be nothing left to feed her needy blood, or the baby’s needy blood, and then it would end.
Even as her throat began to throb and her eyes burned from the chlorine, she’d felt peace for the first time in years.
Seconds later, burly hands had fit themselves under her armpits and hauled her up and out of the quiet place. She’d dragged in air because her body demanded it, not because she’d wanted to.
So Charlotte had hated Ruby. Until she didn’t.
It wasn’t at birth, like some said it would be. She’d been tired and weak and exhausted and still hated the tiny bundle of flesh and bones and mucus that wanted something from her when all she wanted to do was sleep.
Then three days later, everything in the world tipped and righted itself, and when it did, she was in love. They’d been struggling with breastfeeding because of course Charlotte would be terrible at every aspect of being a mother. But she was being stubborn because Hollis was demanding she use a bottle, and giving in on that felt like a preview of a lifetime of giving in on everything. So she’d suffered through Ruby’s red little face scrunched in frustration, her mouth rooting around for sustenance she didn’t seem to actually want to take, for hours and hours and hours. She didn’t hate her because of that. But it didn’t make it easier.
It had been that same in-between time of night, and she’d been in that extraordinarily expensive rocker Hollis had bought her so she didn’t have to use Mellie’s old one. Ruby had been howling for an hour straight, and Charlotte had wondered when her vocal cords would just give up. And then she’d latched.
There was science behind it. Endorphins and oxytocin flooded the brain when the baby suckled. But she didn’t care why or how or for what purpose it had happened; all she knew was that she’d looked down and for the first time hadn’t seen Sterling.
She’d seen Ruby.
So she loved. She loved with all of herself that she was able to give; even the broken parts, jagged and splintered as they were, she gave. It was never enough, though.
Because she lost her daughter in malls and yelled at her when she got frustrated and numbed her own pain at the expense of Ruby’s happiness. Which made her sad enough to want to go get laid or down a bottle of wine or shake out more than one of the Xanax she kept so carefully hidden under the loose floorboard by her bathroom. Relief, no matter how fleeting, was worth the crash.
She was a failure.
She’d failed Trudy. Her beautiful, stubborn, sassy niece. With Trudy, it had been love at first sight, easy in a way it had never been with Ruby. Mellie had come running home, abandoned on the side of a dusty road in Vegas for the lure of slot machines and red sparkly cocktail dresses on women who weren’t pregnant. She’d taken a Greyhound bus with the forty dollars she’d had left in her purse.
Maternal love for Mellie was fashionable onesies and an around-the-clock nanny interviewed and paid for by Hollis. It was light and fun and showing off pictures of matching dresses at a mommies’ brunch where no children were allowed.
They had both been so young, she and Mellie a decade apart and still both so young, when Trudy had come along.
And then Charlotte failed her. Because she’d known what was happening. She’d only been a teenager herself at the time, but she’d seen the shadows come into Trudy’s eyes and the sunlight dip behind clouds. She’d seen Hollis go rigid with rage at the girl for the merest offenses the same way she had with Charlotte. There had been nothing she could do, she’d told herself. Powerless, her hands tied, she’d watched, she’d sat back, she’d let Trudy push her away. And she’d failed her.
If not for Trudy, she would have failed Ruby, too. She wasn’t like her niece. There was no plan, just fear and helpless panic and a desire to hold on to the pieces even as she felt herself spinning off into nothingness.
Trudy was strong, though. Where Charlotte had failed, she had found a way.
Or at least that was the hope. And there was nothing left but hope, so she would wrap her arms around it and hold it to her rib cage and breathe it in, and perhaps it could make her strong. At least strong enough to get through today.
The door opened behind her, and she didn’t even need to turn to know who it was. The tap of small feet against the porch’s hardwood was warning enough.
It was only seconds later that she had a young girl in her lap, warm and drowsy and snuggling underneath Charlotte’s blanket.
“Couldn’t sleep, baby?” she murmured, sliding her fingers through the soft curls.
“Mmm, too excited,” Ruby whispered her confession into Charlotte’s neck.
Charlotte dropped her chin to the top of Ruby’s head. “Yeah? We’re going to have so much fun today.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ALICE
August 4, 2018
Six days after the kidnapping
Nakamura was already sitting at Alice’s desk when she came in the next morning. She hadn’t turned her phone back on until 1:00 a.m., and there hadn’t been any messages waiting for her, so she didn’t know what to expect from him.
If
she’d thought he’d be pissed that she’d walked out after she’d pushed him up against the wall and then shut off her phone for hours, she would have been mistaken.
There was nothing to read off his face, either, or from the relaxed way he’d settled back into her chair, his left foot resting on his right leg. He was tapping a thick bundle of folded papers against his thigh.
She slowed, her boots dragging along the linoleum, reluctant to face the possible confrontation.
But he surprised her instead. “We got the warrant for the house.”
“No way,” she said, the tension she’d been holding in her shoulders dissolving, only to be replaced by a giddy sort of excitement.
Instead of answering, he pushed himself to his feet, keys dangling from his middle finger on one hand, the papers held high like a bounty in the other. “Let’s go.”
“How?” she asked, trailing him, her equilibrium thrown off.
He looked back, cocking an eyebrow at her. “Does it matter?”
“Nope.” Fire crackled along her nerves as her brain caught up with her body just as they stepped out into the fresh air of the morning. It was quiet. Even the vultures had to sleep sometimes.
As if sensing the direction of her thoughts, Nakamura paused, resting his arms against the roof of the car to peer over at her. “Durand was front-page news this morning. Did you see?”
There was something about the casualness of the question that put her on alert. “No. I didn’t have time to check.”
Nakamura hummed and then disappeared from sight, sliding in behind the steering wheel. She pulled her own door open and climbed into the passenger seat.
“Interesting how it’s directing the public’s attention away from Charlotte,” Nakamura said, not catching her eye as he glanced over his shoulder to back out of the spot. “Did they call you for comment?”
“Nope,” Alice said again, fumbling in her purse for her sunglasses. It helped her avoid his scrutiny. “I would have directed them to the communications department if they had.”
“Would you?” Nakamura asked. It was almost a relief, the question. Passive-aggressiveness didn’t suit her personality.
“Do you have something to say?”
“You threw him to the wolves, Garner,” Nakamura said.
“I told you, I didn’t do anything.” Alice watched his face. A small muscle at the corner of his eye twitched. “You don’t believe me.”
“I want to believe that you wouldn’t lie to me.” He took the left too hard, and her shoulder slammed into the window.
“This isn’t about Durand,” she said. “Any one of those reporters could have gotten the jump on the story.”
“Funny how it happened to be the one you know.”
Once again, she wished Nakamura was a jerk. She wished she’d gotten saddled with someone like those boys back in DC who’d flipped on her in an instant.
Maybe then the guilt wouldn’t taste like acid on the back of her tongue.
But she’d gotten Nakamura instead. Chill, open-minded, quick-to-defend, and slow-to-judge Nakamura, who looked like he cuddled puppies and rescued orphans on the weekends.
Lying to him nudged at that moral compass she used to have in a way that it wouldn’t have if her partner had been a complete ass.
She lied anyway because it wasn’t an option not to, but she did feel guilty about it.
“You either trust me or you don’t. But if you don’t, this won’t work.”
“Aah.” His lips tipped up at the corners, but it wasn’t from amusement. “So you’ll request another partner? Run away from your problems like you always do? Is this how you’ve cycled through so many?”
“What, are you my shrink now?” Everything was hot and itchy all of a sudden, and she knew she wasn’t completely in control of the words tumbling out of her mouth. Which was dangerous.
“No, I’m your goddamn partner,” he said, and it was chilling how he kept his voice even while he was spewing annoyance. He was an aberration. “And right now, it doesn’t feel like that.”
“Say the word.”
“Stop.” He cut himself off. Took a deep breath. “Stop saying that. And start acting like you know what you’re actually doing. I don’t want you off the case. But you can’t be pulling disappearing acts like you did yesterday. Don’t pretend that was the first time, either. Going MIA for hours at a time.”
There was nothing to say to that, and it didn’t matter anyway because they were pulling to the curb in front of the Burke residence. The white vans with outrageous satellite dishes signaled that the media hadn’t given up hope on getting a glimpse of the mourning family, but the rabid energy in the air was missing. Maybe some of them were chasing the Zeke Durand angle.
Tell a story. Create a villain.
“The rest of the cavalry coming?” Alice asked as they climbed the steps. They were back into professional mode. Now was not the time for anything else.
Nakamura nodded. “I didn’t want this to be a show of force. But they’ll be along to help execute the search.”
It was funny how they’d so seamlessly switched roles. He was now taking point on the case, without there being a decision made. She wondered if that moment had come when she’d held him up against the wall, her hand at his throat.
Nakamura knocked on the thick door, and it opened as soon as his knuckles left the wood. Hollis. She’d been waiting for them.
“Good morning, ma’am,” Nakamura said, as if it wasn’t unusual for her to be standing there decked out in a power suit with a face full of makeup and her hair shellacked into submission this early in the day.
“Detectives,” Hollis said. In her mouth it sounded like an insult.
Nakamura went through the motions of serving her the warrant, but it was clear that she not only had been expecting them but also was familiar with the legalese of it all. Her husband wasn’t the most prominent judge in the city for nothing.
“Is anyone else here?” Alice asked when Nakamura finished.
Hollis turned to her. “Yes. Charlotte and Melissa are still sleeping.”
“And Trudy?”
There was a crack in the facade for the merest of moments before the mask was firmly back in place. “She’s not here.”
Alice’s attention sharpened. “Where is she?”
“Is that in your warrant, Detective?” Hollis countered, even though she had to know it made no sense. It still shut them down on that line of questioning. Simple and effective.
Alice hummed, but the question settled in under her breastbone. Where was Trudy? It was a missing piece, and Alice didn’t like missing pieces. She had players she needed to keep track of, chess pieces she was overseeing.
She locked eyes with Nakamura, and the distance he’d been keeping up all morning dropped. They’d have to figure out where she’d disappeared to.
“Please know, Detectives”—Hollis interrupted whatever silent conversation Alice and Nakamura had started having—“I will be personally overseeing this entire search. Make a single wrong move and the governor will be hearing about it.”
“Hmm, but that would require him to actually pull his head out of your husband’s ass,” Alice said pleasantly before walking down the hall toward Sterling’s study.
Alice stood in front of Ruby’s bedroom door, fingertips resting against her thighs. She didn’t want to reach for the knob, didn’t want to turn it, didn’t want to push against the wood so it would swing open to reveal its secrets.
She’d already been in Sterling’s office and Trudy’s room, the two places she’d thought would have the most to offer. In the study she’d found the security codes to the mansion, written in an easy and clear scrawl, and had tucked the piece of paper away in her jeans before anyone else saw. But Trudy’s room was clean. There was no secret laptop to find, as far as Alice could tell, even though she suspected the girl kept one. After that room had been cleared, she’d drifted into the hallway, drawn to the door that was still closed.
The knob burned like something bright, like something she couldn’t touch unless she wanted her skin to peel away from the bone.
There was a great deal of noise and movement around her, bodies pushing through the space, disrupting the perfection that was so carefully cultivated, but it didn’t register fully. It was as if everyone else was in real time, and she was stuck in seconds that had slowed to minutes that had slowed to years that had slowed to an eternity.
She was cold. The slope of her ear, the end of her nose, the skin at the top of her spine. She wanted to rub each spot, warm it up until it burned beneath her hand, until she could feel the blood again, hot and pulsing, telling her she was alive.
It wouldn’t. Maybe she was destined to be reminded constantly that she really wasn’t. Alive.
The drag of oxygen into her nostrils, the way it caught in her throat and trickled into her lungs, was there to remind her that she wasn’t quite dead yet, either.
It took three more breaths before she was able to force her body to move. Her hand touched the door, and everything snapped back into focus. The officers around her, the click of Hollis’s heels on hardwood, the subtle smell of freesia sweetening the air that had turned sour from the number of sweaty bodies occupying the space.
“That’s my daughter’s room.” The voice was soft and confused, not accusatory or demanding like it might have been. Alice glanced at Charlotte over her shoulder. She was wrapped in a silk dressing gown, and her hair was down around her shoulders. There was no makeup to ease the shadows beneath her eyes or to cover the hollowness of her cheeks.
Alice sensed, more than saw, Nakamura come up behind her, and it felt like he was backing her up, giving her his trust once more, if only in the form of knowing when she needed help and offering it.
“I know.” Alice pitched her voice just as soft. Charlotte was a skittish animal who needed soothing, who needed gentle pats and reassurances, and Alice would give them if it meant getting what she wanted in the end. “We won’t disturb it.”
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