by Wendy Walker
And now the second one—HE’S NOT WHO HE SAYS HE IS.
Gabe responded, asking for more information. He didn’t tell her about Laura missing. He didn’t want to scare the woman off. He said it was important. I need to know if this is the same guy—what name did he give you? Did you get his phone number or an address? That was all they needed—something to ID the guy. They waited for over two hours, but there was no further reply. Gabe went home, beckoned by his jealous, needy wife, leaving Rosie and Joe to take turns watching the screen.
Rosie paced the room, Mason in her arms. He was looking for attention now. He could sense something was wrong. Very wrong.
“Where did she go?” Rosie asked. “Seriously—why would she tell us those things but then disappear?”
Joe shrugged. “We don’t know what she even means by any of this. Maybe she just got burned. Maybe she’s just pissed and wants us to think things about him. And now she’s changed her mind.…”
Rosie kept walking around the kitchen island, her eyes darting between Joe and the computer and the door—still hoping to see Laura burst through it as though nothing was wrong. Joe kept talking.
“It’s after five, Rosie. I know what Gabe was saying, but…”
“It’s crazy. That story about Rick and Laura.”
They’d both been saying it, reeling in the chaos Gabe had left in their kitchen.
“I can’t believe we didn’t know. That she didn’t tell us. That he didn’t tell us—and you know Mrs. Wallace told your mother, or something close to it. She told your mother everything. And then your mother never said a word.”
“You’re right. We should call the police,” Rosie said, thinking out loud.
Joe came to her side and wrapped his arms around her and their son.
“Okay … and I’m going to call a sitter—he likes Zoe the best, right?”
Rosie nodded and stroked Mason’s soft hair. Then she looked to her phone and dialed 911.
She gave them the address, told them the situation. A unit was dispatched.
“Fuck,” Joe said when she was done. “Here we go.”
He got up from the table and took Mason from her arms. He called the sitter and begged for her to come, even just to take Mason to the park for an hour. He put him in a booster seat and turned on cartoons. He gave him some cookies and milk to distract him. Then he refreshed the computer screen. Still, nothing more. No more messages.
Rosie stood at the window in the family room, watching the street.
“Do you think Rick Wallace did something to her? Is that what Gabe was trying to tell us?” She was talking to herself now.
Joe remained in the kitchen, watching her stare at nothing.
“I don’t know, Rosie.”
* * *
The car appeared—no lights, no siren. It pulled to the curb and stopped. Doors opened, then closed. Rosie was waiting for them on the front walk.
“My sister didn’t come home last night.” She explained it all in the kitchen.
“I’ll take Mason upstairs until Zoe comes. Maybe he’ll nap. Maybe I can see if I can find anything else in Laura’s things.” Joe made excuses to leave the room. Mason knew cops only came when there was trouble.
The officers sat at the table, taking notes. findlove.com, Jonathan Fields, the bartender, the woman they’d found using a fake profile. Those three letters—R-U-N.
Rosie gave her name—Rosie Ferro. Then her sister’s name and description. She pulled up a photo for them to see.
Age, last address, height, weight, the color of her eyes.
Rosie hadn’t spoken to the police since that night eleven years before.
What if she was wrong? That night was upon her now as she described her sister.
“Can you spell your sister’s last name?”
The letters stuck in her mouth as she searched for a sign of recognition. L-o-c …
The younger of the two was a woman, Officer Pearson. She looked to be twenty-five, maybe thirty. She would have been a teenager herself that night Rosie heard Laura scream.
The older one was a man. Officer Conway. He was closer to forty. Wedding ring around his finger and some extra pounds around his waist. He would have been on the force back then.
“What time did she leave the house?”
Rosie pulled herself back. “I’m sorry—what was that?”
“The time,” Officer Pearson asked again. “That your sister left the house?”
She gave them the time, as well as Laura’s phone number and email address.
“A friend of ours was able to get the location where her phone died. He has a contact at the carrier, but that was all he could get. It’s been dead since then.”
Officer Conway flipped his notepad back a few pages. Pretended to read something. “So that’s how you found this bar—where someone recognized a photo from possible men on this website?”
Rosie nodded. “That was our first lead. Now we have a woman on the site who knows him.”
Now Pearson. “But you don’t know for certain that your sister was with him last night. Or that this photo belongs to the man she was communicating with. Is that right?”
“Nothing is certain. That’s why we need her phone records and emails, and access to her account on the website. She spoke to him on the phone. I know that for a fact. His number will be there!”
Now Conway. “You know because she told you?”
“Yes. Because she told me. She got dressed up for a date. She brought nothing with her but a purse. She was going to meet this man, Jonathan Fields. His number will be there!”
Rosie could see the doubt creeping in. Laura hadn’t been gone a day yet.
“You need warrants, right? Can you get them or not?” Rosie asked.
Pearson and Conway exchanged a look.
“It’s up to a judge, but most likely not until morning. We can put out a locate on your car,” Pearson said.
Rosie pounded her fist on the table. “No! I told you—we found the car. It was parked on Richmond. We drove it home! It’s right there—in the driveway!”
Conway now. “So the car isn’t missing. Just your sister?”
“Yes!”
Two heavy sighs, then the officers stood up.
“We have her social security number,” Rosie said, handing a piece of paper to Conway. “What happens now?”
“We’ll file a report. Likely not much happens until tomorrow, unless there’s more that surfaces between now and then to indicate a crime has occurred. Most of these cases, the person shows up.” Conway tried to sound sympathetic but it came off as patronizing.
Rosie stood, helpless, as both officers walked to the door. “And it doesn’t matter that we know she wouldn’t do this?” she asked, following behind them.
Pearson answered without stopping. “Like my partner said, they usually turn up.”
There’d been no promises. No sense of urgency. They didn’t seem to recognize the name, but that would happen the minute they put it in the system. Laura Lochner. The girl found next to a dead body. The murder weapon in her hand.
The decision to call them had felt monumental—as though they would find Laura in an instant even if it came at the cost of dredging up the past. But the car drove off, again with no sirens, no lights. Nothing.
Joe returned from upstairs. He checked the screen then looked up at Rosie, shaking his head. There was nothing new.
“What’s happening?”
Joe came closer. He was moving slowly. Ominously. He had papers in his hand.
“What?” Rosie asked. She didn’t like what she saw on his face.
He handed her the papers. Three of them. Typed notes.
“I found these in her room. In the pockets of her coats.”
“Just like she used to do,” Rosie said. When she was a teenager, Laura would hide things from their mother in her coat pockets—coats worn in a different season, shoved into the back of the closet. It could be anything—cigarettes, condo
ms, her phone. Not that their mother ever bothered to look.
Rosie opened the first note.
I know what you did.
Then the second one.
You should never have come back.
And the third.
You will pay.
Rosie stared at the notes, reading them over and over. Joe stood beside her, holding her by the arms.
She looked at him hard, trying to gauge the amount of fear in his eyes. “Did you know about these?”
It wasn’t the same as hers, her fear at seeing these notes. It changed everything.
Joe was indignant. “What are you asking me?”
“Did Laura tell you about these? Where they came from? Who might have sent them?”
He let go of her and walked away, then turned back. “I can’t believe you would ask me that. Don’t you think I would have told you? If not right away, then certainly this morning when she didn’t come home?”
Rosie couldn’t answer him because she didn’t know what to think anymore. There had been so many conversations that seemed to hush when they heard Rosie coming down the stairs or around the corner—Laura and Gabe and Joe, sometimes just Laura and Joe.
Maybe she told him about the notes. Maybe she told him other things as well.
“Do you know?” Rosie asked, finally.
“Know what?”
She couldn’t say the words. She’d never said them. Never asked the question. Not in eleven years.
“What, Rosie? Just say it already!”
And then they came, escaping from her mouth before she could catch them. The words, the question she didn’t want answered.
“Did she tell you she killed him?”
It had always been there, this question. Hanging over all of them since that night.
All they ever knew was what Laura told the police. She was in the car with her boyfriend. The door opened from the driver’s side. A man dragged him out. Laura heard the crack of wood against bones. Then a cry. She crawled out the other side and hid in the brush by the side of the road. The man swung the bat twice more, then got in the car and drove away.
They held her for twenty-four hours until the car was found, deserted in another part of the reserve, deep in the woods. Lionel Casey had made it his new home.
Laura was never charged. Still, the question lingered—why was she found standing over the body? The bat in her hands? Blood on her clothing?
Rosie asked it again.
“Did she tell you she killed that boy?”
Joe shook his head. “No.”
Then she stood in the silence, wondering things about her husband. Wondering things about her sister. What she had done all those years ago to a boy in the woods. Her first love. A boy named Mitch Adler.
And what she might have done last night to a man named Jonathan Fields.
SIXTEEN
Laura. Session Number Eight. Three Months Ago. New York City.
Dr. Brody: Can’t you see his cruelty?
Laura: Who, Mitch Adler? Cruelty is a harsh word. He was just a high school jerk-off playing his options.
Dr. Brody: He knew he was causing you pain. It wasn’t incidental to his selfish actions. It was intentional. And that is cruelty.
Laura: He seemed troubled to me, and I was drawn to him because of it. Like I could make it better if I just broke through. If I loved him enough.
Dr. Brody: You thought you could fix him and then he would be able to love you?
Laura: I know that sounds ridiculous. I see that now. He was never going to love me.
Dr. Brody: Does that remind you of someone else? Someone from your childhood?
Laura: I don’t think so. What are you getting at?
Dr. Brody: Sometimes we try to fix the past by fixing the present.
Laura: Well, that’s stupid.
Dr. Brody: It’s how our brains work. It’s subconscious. And it’s not stupid.
Laura: But it’s dangerous.
Dr. Brody: Yes. It can be very dangerous.
SEVENTEEN
Laura. The Night Before. Thursday, 10 p.m. Branston, CT.
I know what you did.
You should never have come back.
You will pay.
The notes came at different times and in different places. The first was folded under the windshield wiper of Rosie’s minivan when I took it to the track to run. Round and round in circles I ran, the car parked just up a small hill in the lot of the public high school of the town next door—a town that has schools with good facilities and no guards at the gate because why would they? That’s why people pay millions of dollars for a house there. I wonder what they would think if they knew their poor security let in people like me. People who may have killed someone.
I run each lap in two minutes. Whoever left that note was watching me, waiting for me to make a turn around the bend away from the lot.
The second came in a package from Amazon. It was slipped between the openings where the box hadn’t been taped. It was a box with pajamas, which I had ordered online and had shipped to Rosie’s house.
The third, I found under my pillow.
They were typed. On white paper, cut off after the words, then folded several times like origami.
Why don’t you lock your doors? I asked Rosie the day I found the third note. Aren’t you worried someone might steal something?
Rosie gave me her classic Rosie look of Are you kidding? We were in the kitchen. She swept her arms out in front of her with a great deal of drama. I wish they would! Half this stuff is crap from our old house and Joe’s old house—everything is old. Take it! Take it all—just not the wine.
Haha. I laughed with her, then went upstairs and sat on the bed in the attic, staring at the door and the window and the closet where I’d just hidden the last note. Or the latest note. That was two days ago. Maybe there were more coming. Or maybe something else.
I should be worried about the notes and not this stranger who sits beside me. Maybe I am. Maybe that’s why I haven’t slept more than two hours at a stretch since the first one arrived. Exhaustion in my bones. In my brain. The thick fog is not helping me as the stranger and I pull into the underground garage.
I’ve been talking about that night to this stranger. Jonathan Fielding. The night of the party in the woods. I don’t stop.
* * *
His name was Mitch Adler. He went to the public high school, and I’d met him at a party six months earlier.
He was not a nice boy. He was not a good boyfriend. But I told myself there were reasons, and that I was the only person who could fix him.
“You probably read that he came to the party with a girl,” I say.
Jonathan nods. He doesn’t want to cause another freak-out where he has to risk his life chasing me through a dangerous park.
Then he says, “His parents said it was the girl he’d been seeing all year, bringing her to the house for dinners. They said they thought she was his girlfriend.”
And he continues, “And they said they had never met you or heard your name until that night.”
Jonathan Fielding, you have done your homework.
I add to his research. “Her name was Britney. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Turns out she had been his real girlfriend for over a year. I had no idea. I thought I was his girlfriend. He had sex with her in his car before they went into the woods to join the party,” I say. That’s the truth. “The car was there. It was parked up the road from the others.”
“Why?” he asks.
“Why what?”
“Why did he leave the car so far up the road?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe he thought he would get lucky again.”
Then he looks at me. “But not with that same girl? Britney—the one he’d already had sex with? But with you—two girls in one night?”
Fuck you, Jonathan Fielding. But, yes.
The car is off. We sit in the darkness of the windowless garage and, now, my mood.
“I don’t know what he was thinking.”
He says nothing more, but I know what he’s thinking. All of the facts are there for anyone to find, and I’m sure he’s found them.
I feel defensive. I’m back at the police station eleven years ago, blood on my clothes. Splinters in my hand from holding on to that bat so tight.
Tears streaming down my dirty face. My dirty soul.
“I wasn’t going to have sex with him in that car. I let him think that, but I wasn’t going to have my first time be like that—in the backseat of a car with a jerk who brought someone else to a party. Someone else named Britney who happened to be his real girlfriend.”
Jonathan looks at me and smiles. It’s not a warm smile.
“What did you think was going to happen?” he asks. But it isn’t really a question.
“I don’t know what you mean.” But I do know.
“How were you going to fend him off? That seems dangerous.” He touches my arm and I see a glimpse of reassurance. “I’m not judging you. I just don’t understand why you would leave with him. Go to his car. Get inside.”
I wipe away every trace of an expression.
“That was harsh.” He backs off. Now I see sympathy. “So what did happen?”
It does not get past me that he never mentions the bat. He is not sold on my story the way the police were after they found the car and Lionel Casey.
“I’d been dating the guy. He was a shit. He asked me to do something. An ultimatum. A condition to keep him. And I was desperate. I thought if we were alone, if he saw how much I loved him, he would stop being a shit. I didn’t know about Britney, how he’d been with her for an entire year. I only knew he came and went in my life for months and it was torture. I never knew when he would be there. I never knew when he would disappear. But when he did come back—it was intoxicating. Nothing else could touch that feeling. Didn’t you ever run into a woman who made you feel that way?”
He thinks for a moment, but not really. The shrink was right. Normal people don’t fall into traps like that. Only the broken ones.
“I’m sure I would have if I hadn’t met my wife so early,” he says, lying—and I realize from this lie that he has the ability to be kind. Because that’s what that was—kindness. I was a broken hot mess. I was that friend who everyone tries to help but who won’t listen to reason.