Only when a man had gripped her arm had she realized it had been her own wailing that had caused the beach to go still.
The man had asked her questions with a mouth that moved but had no sound coming out of it.
Charlotte knew Ruby wasn’t in the water. How had she known?
What happened, Charlotte?
When she didn’t respond to the man, he’d pulled her to the beach and then flagged down a lifeguard.
Why had Ruby left? Why couldn’t Charlotte answer? How had they gotten to the beach? Would Ruby have gone with someone she’d known?
Why had the detective mentioned Sterling?
She parked the Range Rover behind the house and sprinted across the back lawn. With luck, Hollis would still be at her ladies’ luncheon.
Charlotte kicked off her shoes when she got to the kitchen and then took off running, her feet warm against the cool hardwood of the hallway. Her heart pounded with that one question.
The door to the study caught for only a second before it gave, and she tumbled over the threshold. Everything was in perfect order, as always, but there had to be something. Had to be.
She stared at the desk. The top of it was clear of any paper, so she pulled at the drawers. One by one they crashed to the floor, the edge of the bottom left one catching her toe.
Turning her face into her shoulder, she screamed so that her flesh muffled the pain. Once she’d caught her breath, she started digging. There were papers and notes and files. Her mother’s drawer was obvious, and she pushed it aside after flipping through receipts from lunches and hair salons.
Her father’s proved no more useful, though. When she was done, her fingernails scraped along the bottom, making sure there was no paper stuck in the crevices. Nothing.
She kicked at the wood with her uninjured foot and then went to work on the bookshelf, pulling the neatly aligned volumes to the floor. They plunged toward the thick carpet, their fall muffled by the expensive Oriental.
There had to be something.
When all the books were on the floor, she crouched and started shaking out the pages. Sharp pain radiated from her kneecaps from when she had dropped to them without regard for where the hardwood would be carpeted, but she ignored it. Her fingers caught along the edges of paper, tearing the guts from the books until she sat surrounded by her own destruction.
It was then that Hollis walked in.
The heels should have been warning enough, but there was a faint buzzing in Charlotte’s ears that had shielded the sound.
Her mother stopped just inside the doorway, her eyes sliding over the desk and then to Charlotte, who was still wearing her T-shirt, jeans, and baseball cap. She was panting also, she realized, and there was snot running out of her nose, getting caught in the slight upturn of her lip.
Once again she was weak, so weak, beneath her mother’s gaze. Cracked and poised to shatter, the girl made of glass.
“You’ll need to clean this up” was all Hollis finally said. “The police will have a warrant by the morning.”
Charlotte collapsed against the floor, the sobs finally taking over her body, as her mother walked out of the room.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ALICE
August 4, 2018
Six days after the kidnapping
It was a Saturday night, so the bar was full. Mostly off-duty cops and the odd local here or there. A group of college students crowded around the jukebox in the back, giggling with each song selection.
Alice slid onto a stool at the very end of the long, smooth expanse of wood so she could avoid the mirror that ran the length of the wall behind it. This wasn’t a day when she wanted to catch her own eyes in the reflection.
She ordered a whiskey sour and then let it sit at her elbow as she scanned the room. It had been years since she’d had alcohol. Her last drink had been two months after Lila was killed, the night she’d gone home with Ben Wilson and woke up the next morning with a hangover and no memory of the event at all.
It hadn’t been the sex that had knocked her sober. It had been the fact that she’d forgotten, even for a minute, Lila’s face. The smell of her hair. The way she giggled at knock-knock jokes and swore like a sailor. She’d been trying to numb the pain, not erase it.
So she’d stopped.
The whiskey sour was so pretty, though. It was a pale yellow, but in the dim light of the bar, it turned gold. She touched the pad of her finger to the cherry that swam among the ice cubes in the squat tumbler and sent it bobbing.
Then Alice brought the glass to her lips, her tongue darting out to taste the sweetness along the rim. The cool liquid burned on the way down her throat, only to settle in her stomach, an unwelcome presence. The alcohol would hit her bloodstream soon, but she wanted it to be sooner. She wanted to be drunk already; she wanted to be drunk yesterday or the day before or the day they found Ruby Burke’s tiny body crumpled beneath peach sheets.
Forgetting Lila. It had never been worth it before, but now? Now, she chased oblivion. When the bartender made his way back to her end, she ordered a few shots of tequila. In the next minute there were three small glasses sitting in front of her.
“Cutting loose, huh?” Nakamura climbed onto the empty stool next to hers.
Of course he would find her here. It was the police bar, after all. If she’d wanted solitude, she could have gone farther afield.
She didn’t answer him. Simply tossed back each of the shots, sinking into the pain as she would a too-hot bath.
“Turns out there’s no Enrique Lopez,” he said, and she could feel his eyes on her throat. She slammed the last glass down onto the bar that was now sticky from her sloppiness.
“Figured,” she murmured as Nakamura signaled to the guy. He ordered a beer, and she got another whiskey sour. Both men tucked in their lips at the request, but neither said anything.
“So we have our first solid lead,” he said, and nodded his thanks when his drink was set in front of him.
“If you can call it that.”
He bumped her shoulder. “You’ve been more pessimistic than usual about this guy.”
She shrugged. “Call me jaded.”
“Oh, I have, and I will again,” he said, laughter in his voice. He was letting go, unwinding. It was what she should be doing. Instead, she was seeking to obliterate every cell that remembered Ruby Burke’s shoes against the sand. No. She wanted to obliterate every cell that remembered how Lila’s dimples had popped out when she laughed. Not Ruby. Lila.
It was all starting to blur.
“Can we not?” She propped her forehead against her palm, her elbow sore against the wood. “Can we just not? For tonight?”
He took a long sip of beer. “Yup.”
The silence lasted only seventy-six seconds. She counted.
“Are you doing okay?”
“Do I look like I’m doing okay?” She tipped her head so she could look at him from under heavy lashes.
“Honestly?” Nakamura asked. “Yeah.”
She huffed out a surprised breath. “Really?”
“Can’t ever really tell with you, Garner.” He ran his thumbnail under the label on his bottle. “Most of the time? You’re a mystery.”
It was how she wanted it, how it needed to be. But she was still surprised. Sometimes she thought they could all—every single one of them—see the dirtiness of her soul, the blackness that lurked there now.
“Nah, I’m an open book,” she said, and it was reckless. Lila’s face kept blending into Ruby’s, though, and she needed the adrenaline the taunt brought to keep her from tipping over some cliff.
He took the bait. “Oh yeah? Tell me something, then.”
There was reckless and then there was dangerous. The line was a fine one, and the alcohol wasn’t helping her define it. “Sometimes I don’t care.”
“About what?”
She shrugged, hoping it was all-encompassing. “This.”
“Only sometimes?”
With a smirk, she gave him a cheers with her mostly empty glass. “Touché.”
Their glasses were taken away and replaced with new ones, and she made a note to tip with a heavy hand.
“Tell me something, then,” she said once they were left alone again.
“Sometimes I care too much.” He shrugged.
She laughed at that. “Only sometimes?”
“Ah, you got me.”
They sipped their drinks and watched the TVs and even swayed a bit on their stools when an old seventies rock ballad came on.
“Why do you care so much?” she asked when the notes faded into something faster, more modern.
He squinted and ran long fingers through his dark hair. “I’m selfish, I think? I like the feeling of saving people. Caring makes it easier to save people. Makes it easier to get up early and stay late, I guess. Make sacrifices you wouldn’t have otherwise.”
“Hero complex?”
It was tinged with self-deprecation, his laugh. “All my life. You know, they give you a badge and a gun, and suddenly that impulse to go looking for trouble just so you can be the good guy goes from pathetic to heroic.”
“You’ve never been pathetic a day in your life, Nakamura.” There was a lot she didn’t know, but she knew that. Maybe White Hats existed only in old Westerns, but there had to be genuinely good people left in the world. Nakamura was one of them.
“You think too highly of me,” he protested. “I wore a Superman cape up until the age of twelve.”
She giggled, and they were both taken aback by the sound.
He recovered first. “So what about you? Why are you doing this if you don’t care? Can’t be for the money.” They touched glasses in sad acknowledgment.
Alice considered the question.
There was a human need to be known by others. It drove criminals to confession; it withered the souls of those who had no one to be known by. She wasn’t immune. That need was pulsing now, an infected wound, maybe, but there nonetheless.
“My dad was a cop,” she started.
“No shit!” Nakamura’s eyes lit up. “That’s cool.”
She rolled her eyes at his optimism. “He was shot on duty. Routine traffic stop gone bad, you know the story.”
He dimmed as she expected. “Ah. I’m sorry.”
Lifting one shoulder, she kept her eyes on the bar. “I was just a kid.”
“Almost makes it worse, yeah?” he prodded.
“Maybe,” she said. “The guy got off on a technicality. Something got messed up with his arrest, and he walked.”
“Shit,” Nakamura murmured.
“Never seemed fair, you know?” she said. “I’ve always been big on justice.”
“You see that bullshit all the time, though.” He glanced at her. “I’d think you’d get more frustrated than anything. Being in the same system.”
It struck her as really funny, and the next thing she knew, she was doubled over. The laughter was tinged with mania and alcohol. “Oh man. Yeah. I know that now.”
He was watching her with a cautious smile. “Sorry. Stating the obvious.”
“Never underestimate wide-eyed optimism, buddy,” she said. “There was a time in my life I thought I could be the change I wanted to see in the world. And all that bullshit.”
Their silence then was companionable. He wasn’t pushing, but she still had an itch at the base of her spine. She didn’t yet feel known.
She nudged his shoulder. “Ask me more.”
“Was it one thing? That shattered your rose-colored glasses?” The question tumbled out, and she knew it had been waiting there, that he’d been holding it back. He wanted to know if it was Lila.
“She wanted to be a police officer,” Alice said with a smile. “In that way young kids do.”
“I wanna be a police when I grow up.” Lila snuggled into Alice’s side. Her weight against Alice’s ribs was familiar, so familiar. She’d felt it there when Lila had existed only within Alice’s body. She’d been a constant pressure—her feet, her hands, her elbows, her knees. Always moving, always making her presence known. I am a being in this world, Lila had screamed from the womb.
“A policewoman,” Alice said with a smile. “Why do you want to be a policewoman?”
It was what Lila knew, nothing more than that. Still, Alice asked.
“I wanna catch bad guys like you do,” Lila said, tangling their fingers together.
Catching bad guys. Something twisted in her chest, a hand pulling all the tissue in her lungs tight.
“It wasn’t Lila,” Alice said, making it easy on him because she wanted to talk anyway. “Or, it wasn’t just her. I thought the system made sense. I thought human error was the reason my father’s killer was walking free. A cop had been distracted at the wrong time in the wrong place, and boom. A lifetime of resentment from my mother and yours truly.”
Nakamura nodded, then signaled for refills.
“Maybe I had a little bit of that hero complex of yours,” she said. It felt like a lifetime ago. A millennium. “But it wasn’t an anomaly.”
“The fuckup?”
She swallowed her mouthful of whiskey. “It was the norm.”
“The good guys win sometimes,” he said.
“Mostly they don’t, though,” she let slip. Or maybe he already knew she wouldn’t use “we.” Maybe he knew she wasn’t a White Hat like him.
He slid her a glance, and she thought he probably hadn’t known. Now he did. “So what do you do about it? Stop caring?” He paused. “You care about Ruby, though, don’t you? Too much.”
It was a testament to the hour and the number of times the bartender had been over already that he said it at all. Or it was a testament to how, once allowed, boundaries and other hesitancies blurred quickly.
“What makes you think I care about Ruby?”
He tipped his head, more reflective than judgmental of the harsh question. “Because of Lila.”
She flinched, and for the first time she saw regret in the way the corners of his mouth tipped down.
“I’m sorry,” he said, pushing his drink away. Then he reached in his back pocket for his wallet, pulling out a handful of twenties. It would more than cover their tab.
“Wait.” She grabbed his wrist. His pulse spiked beneath her thumb, but his expression remained neutral and calm. “Ruby isn’t Lila.”
“I know that,” he said slowly. “The cases are similar, though. It’s expected that you would be affected by it.”
“Do you know what people think?” she asked, not letting him go. If she did, he would walk away. And then would she ever be known? Did it even matter anymore? Everything was a bit hazy and sideways, and she didn’t remember why she cared in the first place. “They think I’m trying to solve Lila’s case.”
“It was solved, though,” he said. Stating the obvious again.
“They think I set the guy up,” she said, and the words were like little weights lifted off her chest.
He reeled back, as far as he could go with his arm caught by her hand. “Has anyone said that to you?”
“No.” She shrugged. “I see it in the way they look at me, though.”
Her heart rate synced to his as they stood there, both knowing what he wanted to ask.
“I didn’t,” she finally said. “I would have. If I’d thought he’d done it and there wasn’t evidence to prove it. I absolutely would have done it. But I didn’t.”
He relaxed, and only when the tendons in his arm softened beneath her fingers did she realize how tense he’d been. “So screw ’em, right?” he said.
“Yeah.” She smiled and released him. He didn’t run. “I don’t care about Ruby. You should know that.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not solving my daughter’s case,” she said and wondered if she was even making sense. “And I think that’s important for you to keep in mind.”
“Just because she isn’t your daughter doesn’t mean you don’t care about her,” h
e said, but he was already watching her differently than he had been ten seconds earlier.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “My daughter is the only thing I care about.”
There was a missed call from Bridget on Alice’s phone. She didn’t see it until Nakamura bundled her into a taxi with cash for the driver.
It was from several hours ago, and it was too late to call the woman back. Alice did anyway.
Bridget picked up on the second ring.
“What do you have for me?” Alice asked, only a slight slur to the words.
“Have you been imbibing, Detective Garner?” Bridget’s voice was amused.
The streetlamps created a soft golden-tinged kaleidoscope in the night, and her head lulled back against the taxi’s leather seats. She was probably drunk.
“Shamelessly,” Alice said. “What do you have for me?”
There was a pause. Bridget wasn’t chewing gum. It was an odd thing to notice, but Alice did. The silence was heavier because of it. “I’ve got nothing,” Bridget finally sighed.
“Why are you calling me, then?”
Another long beat. “I should have something.”
Alice’s pulse ticked up. “You keep saying that.”
“’Cause it’s true,” Bridget said. “No one’s this good.”
“People are that good.”
“Serial killers, maybe.” There was a shrug in Bridget’s voice. Then a pause. “Pros.”
“Hired?” Alice watched the houses get shittier along the way. She was too tired for this conversation.
“Something like that,” Bridget muttered. “Look. Let’s talk in the morning, yeah? You coming in?”
“Hangover and everything.” Alice smiled.
More silence.
Then: “You okay?” For once it didn’t sound like a script.
“Do you ever want to be known?” Alice asked instead of answering. The answer was always no, anyway.
“Known? Sure, yeah,” Bridget said, and there were spaces between the words where she would have snapped her gum.
The darkness wrapped around Alice, and she ignored the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, watching her. “It’s strange, isn’t it? How we’re always the good guy in our own story. The protagonist.”
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