by Lisa Jackson
“You know what they say about reformed sinners,” was the husky response.
“I quit years ago. Years! Now, here. Talk to Nicole.”
A second later, Lily’s husky voice was clearer. “Hey, Nikki. We were just checking on you, no big deal, and if you say you’re cool, then we’ll touch base later.”
“I’m fine. Mom just won’t believe it.”
“Some things never change.”
“I guess not.”
“I’ll call later, or, more likely, Mom will.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Okay, she’s gone now, into the powder room. Oh, God, she is in such a mood. The thing is, she’s all about baking you something, if you can believe it, like peanut butter cookies or an apple pie or something. She keeps obsessing about it.”
“I don’t even like peanut butter cookies.”
“I know, I know, but I do, and sometimes she gets us—or what we like—mixed up. Remember the time she bought me that series of crime novels for Christmas and gave you the poetry books? I mean, really? She didn’t even realize what she’d done.”
“That was right after Dad died,” Nikki said, remembering. Charlene had been in a fog for nearly a year, even though her marriage to Nikki’s father had been far from perfect. “She was a little out of it.”
“Still is, if you ask me,” Lily said. “Anyway, right now she feels like she has to do something motherly.” Her voice lowered. “Actually, I think she planned to pick something up at a bakery, she detests getting the kitchen dirty.”
“I know.” Nikki almost smiled. She and Lily were direct opposites, but they had one thing in common: They understood their mother’s need to control them and fought it at every turn. “I need to talk to her. About what she remembers about the Duvals.”
“Oh, God. Once she starts, she’ll never stop.”
“Has to be done.”
“Well, fine, then it’s your funeral.”
“Very funny.”
“If you say so. She’s coming back—”
“Not now.” Nikki wasn’t ready to deal with Charlene. Not yet. “I’ll talk to her and you later.”
“Okay. Take care of yourself. Ciao,” Lily said with a perfect Italian accent that ended the call.
Nikki stuffed her phone in her pocket and tried once again to remember the theater as it had been. Standing in what had been the middle of the seating area but was now occupied by a coffee kiosk, Nikki imagined the three sisters, huddled together in the middle rows, maybe popcorn and sodas or red licorice in hand. They’d been watching Shrek, a recently released kids’ movie. And what had happened? Had they left during the film? Why? On their own? Or lured? Or coerced? Some other moviegoers had reported seeing them before and during the show, but not after. So what had happened? Why had they left?
She glanced up to the area where the projection room had been situated, the small windows still visible, and as she did she felt as if someone were staring at her, someone located in a dark corner, or on the balcony, or . . .
Oh, get over your bad self! There is nothing wicked, nothing degenerate here.
But in her mind’s eye she saw those three blond, blue-eyed girls in the darkened theater being lured even farther into the shadows . . .
“Nikki? Nikki Gillette!” A woman’s voice cracked into her reverie and she actually jumped.
She whipped around to spy a tall brunette in a summer dress and green apron heading her way. Her long hair was wound tight onto the back of her head, and huge gold hoops glinted as they swung from her ears.
“I thought that was you!” She smiled, a wide, toothy grin rimmed by shiny pink lips. “I work at the flower shop now. Who woulda thunk, right?” Rolling her eyes, she hooked her thumb toward the door of the storefront flanked by risers of colorful cut flowers. As she passed by the coffee shop situated in the middle of the mall, Nikki got a better view of her. “You don’t recognize me, do you?” She seemed amused and rolled her palms upward. “It’s me, Maxie.”
“Maxie Johnson?” Nikki asked. This outgoing woman was the girl with whom Nikki had taken horseback riding lessons when she’d been in junior high. Maxine “Maxie” Johnson had been the youngest in the class, a doe-eyed girl who had shied away from even the gentlest horse in the paddock even though her mother had been the riding instructor.
“Yeah, yeah! Well, it’s Maxie Kendall now, I’m married—well, I was.” She shrugged. “Just got divorced and here I am working at the florist shop. I guess that’s what I get for marrying a lawyer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He was a jerk. Cheated on me from the get-go. I’m even thinking of taking my maiden name back.” She frowned a bit, then waved a hand as if dismissing her ex as if he were a bothersome mosquito. “I just read that you were in some kind of accident in the river . . . after the hurricane.”
“Yeah, well . . .” She nodded toward the sling on her shoulder. “I’m okay.”
“Oh, yikes.” Maxie pulled a face. “Hurt?”
“Not too bad.”
“You got that in the river, right? At the Beaumont estate. I heard about it.”
“Bad news travels fast.”
“Right. I guess. Anyway, you know, I knew those girls. The Duvals? Well, not so much Rose, she was too little, but Holly and Poppy, yeah. They were in the neighborhood. They lived down the street from me, just down the block. We—my parents and me—our house was just across from the park until they finally bought the arena and that dump of a house that came with it. We all moved out there, you know, to Heritage Equestrian Acres. Geez, that name’s a mouthful, isn’t it? Look, I’m on a break, only fifteen minutes, thought I’d grab an iced coffee. You?”
“No, no, I’m good.”
“Okay.” She stepped to the window and placed her order. “Yeah, iced mocha, light whip . . . what? Sure. Sprinkles. Why not?” She sent the barista another brilliant smile and while she waited for the concoction to be created, said to Nikki, “It’s weird, you know. Working here, where it happened. I mean, those girls were literally right about here the last time they were seen.” She pointed to the floor. “Freaky.”
“What do you think happened?”
“Dunno.” She shook her head. “But Mom has her theories . . . oh, thank you.” She paid for her drink, took it and took a sip. “My one indulgence.”
“What does your mom think?”
“What everyone does, that Owen, the brother, did it, but with Mom it’s different. She’s kind of a psychic, you know. Gets all these ‘vibes.’ Or at least she used to. She doesn’t do much predicting anymore. But back then, when I was taking lessons with you? Mom told me she could tell I’d never be a horsewoman from the moment I stepped into the stable. She was sure right on that one.”
It hadn’t taken a psychic to see that Maxie had been deathly afraid of horses during the lessons. Nikki could have called that one.
“So you knew the Duval sisters?”
“Yeah, some. Holly, mainly. She was one year younger in school, but we hung out a bit. Usually with Andrea. You know her, right? Andrea Bennett, no, she got married. What was the guy’s name? He wasn’t from around here, someone she met while going to school . . . oh, God. Wait! Clancy. His name’s John or Josh or something like that, but Clancy, that’s her last name. Andrea and Holly and Brit—that’s Brittany Sully, I don’t know if she’s married or not, but they were all real tight.” Maxie smiled, proud of herself for coming up with it. “I haven’t thought of Andrea in years.” She took another sip, then checked her watch. “Oops! My break’s about over and I have to run. My boss—a real stickler about clocking in and out, he’s got an OCD thing about it. That’s right, isn’t it? OCD? Obsessive-compulsive whatever.”
“Disorder.”
“Right. That’s it. Anyway, he’s beyond anal and I don’t want to lose my job.” She started walking toward the florist shop.
“But your mom—is she around?” Nikki asked.
“Oh, she’s always at the arena. If you want, y
ou can probably catch her there.” And then she was off, hurrying back to the shop, where a short man in his own green apron stood in the door scowling at Maxie as she scurried past the rows of cut carnations and roses to disappear into the store behind him.
Nikki thought about it.
She needed to begin digging deeper into the people who knew the Duval sisters. She’d look up Andrea Clancy and Brit Sully, as well as any other friend of the victims, but for now, Nikki decided to start with Maxie’s mother, Chandra “the psychic horsewoman” Johnson.
* * *
“So it’s true, then,” Harvey Duval said over the wireless connection, when Reed, sitting in his office at the station, finally reached the victims’ father. “My daughters are really gone. An officer came by the other day, but I still held out a little bit of hope. Silly, I know, but . . . it’s funny what you can tell yourself. The lies. The platitudes.” There was a soft, resigned sadness to his voice, and he let out an audible sigh. “I’d expected it, of course, after all this time. At least I’d convinced myself that I would be ready for any kind of news, but it’s still a punch to the gut. They . . . they were so beautiful. So innocent. Dear God.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Reed offered. He was recording the conversation but still wrote notes to himself.
“Me too.” Harvey cleared his throat. “Do you have any idea who did this?”
“Not yet.”
“Margaret’s devastated, of course. I called her after the deputy who gave me the news left. I thought it was the right thing to do even though it’s no secret that ours wasn’t the happiest of marriages.” There was still a bite to his words, even years later.
“You didn’t get along?”
He snorted. “She expected me to claim a child as my own, and then when we lost the girls . . . Well, it was too much. We were already about to split up. When we were house hunting, we were really looking for an apartment. She needed me to sign on the lease, and I thought it was the decent thing to do.” He cleared his throat. “But then decency’s pretty hard to come by. Anyway, then we lost the girls and so we tried to put it back together, the marriage. Of course it didn’t work. Too much water under the bridge. The girls disappearing was the final straw.” Another sigh, then, “There’s some finality to this, I suppose.”
“Except that Rose is still missing.”
A beat. “Right. But it’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?” he said defeatedly. “And then, no doubt, you’ll locate her, too. Look, I’ve got to go. I told the police everything I know over and over again. Nothing’s changed.”
Except that two bodies were located.
Harvey ended the call.
In Reed’s estimation, quite a bit had changed. He pulled up Harvey Duval’s statement and reread it, but it was almost word for word what Margaret’s had been; basically, the kids were at the movies, Owen was in charge of the girls, while Margaret and Harvey had looked at some open houses, then went out to dinner, and when they got back all three of the girls had disappeared. He hadn’t even been that concerned to begin with as the oldest daughter, Holly, was on the threshold of becoming a teenager, had been feeling her “wild oats” and been rebelling. They’d caught her smoking and sneaking out, but until the day they’d gone missing had never involved her sisters, other than insisting Poppy “cover” for her, which meant lying, and according to Harvey, Poppy had done it on several occasions. Rose, too young, hadn’t really been aware of her older sister’s open defiance.
Reed shuffled backward, through all of Margaret’s statements over the years. She’d never mentioned that her eldest daughter had been any kind of trouble. When asked about it, she’d dismissed Holly’s disobedience as nothing but a teenager pushing her limits, testing her parents, and had indicated that Harvey, ever the dictator, had overreacted to his daughter’s “antics.”
He read her direct quote: “It’s all just a part of growing up, you know, but Harvey didn’t have a normal childhood, didn’t understand that kids push boundaries. His own parents were of the ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ mentality. But then I knew he didn’t care that much, not really. The fact that he left me, in all of my grief and despair, when our daughters were missing, for the love of God. Who does that and remarries and starts another family? It’s like he just didn’t care.”
Or couldn’t face the horror of the truth.
Delacroix appeared as he was still going over the statements. “What did you find out from the father?” she asked.
“Not a lot. He seems to be devastated, but then who wouldn’t be?”
“Right.”
“Catch me up,” he suggested, as in the interest of speeding the investigation along, they’d split up and interviewed different people during the past day and a half.
“Okay.” She sat on the corner of Morrisette’s desk and scrolled through her phone. “First up, Tyson and Baxter Beaumont, the father and son, came in and gave statements about the property where the victims were found. I typed them up, they signed, and I sent you a copy just this morning.” She glanced up from her screen. “Nothing of importance that I could find. Nothing we didn’t really know. I asked them why they thought Bronco was on the property, and they agreed he was probably there to steal whatever he could find since his grandfather had a key and was now dead so he couldn’t keep an eye on the estate or Bronco.”
“Did they say anyone else was ever on the property?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Not even squatters, but they mentioned they were going to put up some kind of security system and new signs. They seemed pissed about the whole thing, more worried about the notoriety of bodies being found there and what it would do to their property values. They seemed to care more about money than they were concerned that those kids were buried there.” She frowned. “My take: coldhearted pricks. But I didn’t put that in the file.”
“Good.” He nodded.
“Then I called Ashley McDonnell, now Ashley Jefferson, Owen Duval’s alibi. She’s married now, got a couple of kids and lives out on Tybee.” Delacroix scrolled down on her phone, then looked at him and shook her head. “Piece of work. She was more concerned with getting her power on after the storm and having her yard cleaned up than she was about the bodies.”
“Old news?”
“I guess. She was actually irritated that I was bothering her. Worried aloud about not being connected to the Internet even though her husband is some kind of computer wiz. She was late posting to her blog.” Her eyebrows elevated. “As I said, ‘piece of work.’ ”
He leaned back in his chair. “Does she still keep in contact with Owen?”
“Nope, acted as if he was ‘just a friend’ in high school. I got the impression that she thought she was doing him a favor hanging out with him.”
“You buy that?”
“Nuh-uh, that woman is too self-centered to have taken on a charity case. People don’t get meaner after high school, you know? They usually grow up, become kinder, not the other way around.”
“She was Owen’s alibi.”
“Still is. Said they just hung out at her folks’ place as the parents were away for the weekend.”
“Doing what?”
“Watching TV.” Her eyes held his. “I call ‘bullshit’ on it, but she wouldn’t budge. I think we might need to talk to her in person, get a bead on her.”
“Everything she said matches what Owen Duval said in his statement.”
“Hmmm.” Her eyebrows knitted. “No one else seemed to think they were a couple. Check out the old statements.”
“I know. Maybe someone will change their tune.”
She hopped off the corner of the desk and walked to the window, staring through the glass. “I just get the feeling that someone’s lying. No . . . that’s not right. I get the feeling that a lot of people are lying and I’m not sure why. What did Margaret Duval say?”
“A lot. She’s pretty broken up of course. Had held on to the belief that her daughters were alive.�
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“I guess there’s always hope,” she said, biting her lip thoughtfully.
“Apparently.” Reed explained about his meeting at the parsonage and ended with, “She told me to bring her youngest daughter back alive.”
Delacroix took the visitor’s chair. “Did she? And how did you respond?”
“I didn’t.”
“Because you think it’s impossible?”
“No, because I don’t like to make promises I can’t keep. What did you find out about the locket?” he asked, and noted that she was taller than his previous partner. Delacroix sat up taller and straighter in the chair than Morrisette had.
“Nothing. Empty.” She raised a shoulder. “It was worth a shot, but no, it wasn’t like some kind of Nancy Drew moment when the final and dangerous clue to the mystery is revealed within the clasp of a small piece of jewelry. So I just put it back with everything else.”
“Damn. That would’ve made things so much easier.”
She actually smiled, showing off a bit of white teeth. “I know, right? Well, here’s something. I did get hold of Owen Duval. He wasn’t all that talkative, insisted upon lawyering up as if he expected to be arrested or something.”
“Really?”
“He claimed that he was railroaded when the girls disappeared, that the cops didn’t look any further than him.”
“Could be true,” Reed said, motioning toward the files. “The detective in charge at the time zeroed in on Owen Duval from the get-go.”
“He shouldn’t have?” Delacroix was surprised.
“Don’t know. He was the likely suspect, but even with his solid alibi, the detective, Charles Easterling, was set on Owen.”
“You talk to him? Easterling.”
“Can’t. He was near retirement at the time and died a couple of years ago. The cop who inherited the case retired, too. Moved to Chicago. I did talk to him, but he couldn’t tell me any more than what was in the files. So, here we are.”