Authors: Lis Wiehl,April Henry
“But if he’s got more, where are they?” Nicole asked. “Not at his house.”
“They have to be someplace,” Allison said. “We have to find them.”
W
ith a sigh, Allison put her key in the front door, only to find it was already unlocked. Even though Lindsay had been living with them for more than a week, Allison still wasn’t used to the idea that just because Marshall’s car wasn’t in the driveway, it didn’t mean no one was home.
Now, instead of coming home to silence or Marshall just coming back from a run, Allison always found Lindsay. Sometimes with Marshall, sometimes alone. But always talkative, bored, restless. Today her sister hurried around the corner carrying a bright turquoise box emblazoned with the word
Congratulations!
“This came for you in the mail today. What is it? Did you win a prize?” Usually Lindsay looked closer to fifty than thirty, but right now she looked about ten.
After setting down her briefcase, Allison took the package from Lindsay, slit the tape with her keys, and lifted the lid. Four identical smiling babies looked up at her. The package held four cans of baby formula and a sheaf of coupons.
Someone in some doctor’s office somewhere had sold her name. Without speaking, Allison tried to jam the lid back on. Her hands were shaking. She couldn’t line up the corners. As soon as she managed to close it up tight, the box would go straight into the trash.
“Why did they send you this?” After a long pause, Lindsay answered her own question. “Oh, Allison.” She put her hands on Allison’s shoulders. “Leave that alone. I’ll get it in a minute.”
Allison felt her sister’s scrawny arms go around her waist as she hugged her from behind. Tears clogged her throat.
Lindsay whispered into her ear, “I didn’t know.”
“We hadn’t told anyone yet. I didn’t even make it to three months.”
“What happened?”
“They don’t know.” Allison twisted away from her sister. This time she managed to get the lid back on. She took a deep breath. It would be wrong to throw it away. She would donate it to the Oregon Food Bank.
“Are you going to try again?” Lindsay asked.
Allison didn’t answer. She had opened up her home to her sister, but she didn’t have to open up her heart. Especially when the answer was one she didn’t yet know herself.
“I would love to have a baby,” Lindsay said slowly.
Allison gritted her teeth. Was that how Lindsay planned to fill her newly empty days, her lack of sober or stable friends? With a baby? When she could barely care for herself?
“But I can’t,” Lindsay continued. “A few years ago I got some kind of STD so bad that the doctor said my tubes are ruined.”
“Oh, Linds.” Allison was suddenly ashamed of her unkind thoughts.
Lord, give me a loving heart. Help me to see my sister through Your eyes
.
Now Allison was the one who hugged her sister, and it was Lindsay who tolerated the embrace for only a few seconds before moving away. She sat down on the couch.
“It’s okay. I mean, what kind of life could I give it?” Lindsay picked up a throw pillow and pressed it against her chest. “I never went to college. I’ve never had a real job, at least not one that didn’t involve me wearing a uniform and asking people if they wanted fries with their order. And who would want to hire me now, with my record?”
“The longer you stay clean, the more people will be interested in hiring you.”
Lindsay’s mouth twisted. “Do you really believe that? In today’s economy? They’d rather get some sixteen-year-old cutie.”
“Still, it would be good for you to find something to do, Lindsay. Maybe volunteer work. Something.”
“I’ve been trying to keep busy.” Lindsay crossed her arms over the pillow. “I go to NA meetings. I pick up the house. Today I gave myself a pedicure. I haven’t thought about my toes in years. They were all raggedy. I found some polish in your bathroom—I hope that’s okay.” She looked up at Allison. “Did Mom know about the baby?”
“I hadn’t told her yet. I knew she would be really excited. First grandchild and all that. We just wanted to be sure. I guess we were right to wait.”
Lindsay dropped her head, so her next words were muffled by the pillow. “Have you talked to her about me?”
“Of course I told her you were staying with us. I didn’t want her worrying about you.”
Allison had done a little more than that. She had driven over to her mom’s the day before. “Mom, won’t you just talk to Lindsay?” she had said. “She’s really trying.”
“I can’t,” her mother had answered. “My counselor said I need to practice tough love. If your sister is really better, then I’ll talk to her in a few months.”
“But she’s your daughter!”
“You think I don’t know that?” Donna Mitchell’s dark eyes, so like Allison’t own, drilled into her. “But I don’t do her any favors if I keep enabling her. I’m not going to rescue Lindsay from the consequences of her own self-destructive behavior anymore. The last time she was here, I told her if she left that was it. And she still did.”
“That’s why she needs to know you love her.”
“I do love her. But it’s not about love anymore, Allison. I know you think I’m being cold. I’m not. It’s tearing me apart. You don’t know how many times when you were in college I took her in, bailed her out, hung up the phone when one of her druggie friends called, drove to some terrible part of town and picked her up, held her head when she vomited, listened to her lie to me, and then realized after she left that she had—yet again—stolen from me. I’ve been doing it for years. And I just—I just can’t anymore.”
She ran her knuckles under one eye, and only then did Allison realize she was crying.
“Lindsay had every advantage you had—she was smart and pretty and had such a beautiful spirit. Now she’s missing teeth! I don’t even want to think about what she’s done out there on the street to earn money.”
“Mom,” Allison said gently, “the one thing Lindsay didn’t have is Dad. I got three more years of him than she did. She was only thirteen when he died. She had started pulling away from him, and then she never had a chance to come back.”
She remembered Lindsay sobbing the morning their father had died, crying so hard she had thrown up. Weeping, gagging, and moaning, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” her face red and sweaty and indescribably bereft as she lay curled up on the bathroom floor.
“You think I don’t know that? I grieve for her, too, Allison. For the Lindsay I used to know, the Lindsay I raised. But that was seventeen years ago. She’s a different Lindsay now. If you give her a roof over her head and food on her table, then you’re just giving her a little R&R before she goes back to what she always does.” With a shaking hand, Donna pushed a piece of hair out of her eyes. “She’ll end up going right back to her old life. She has no reason to change, because she knows that she’ll have someone to pick up the pieces. Lindsay needs to suffer major consequences for her behavior. The more she gets rescued, the less reason she has to change.”
“But she’s trying, Mom. She’s really trying. She just needs a little help.”
“Help to what? Self-destruct? You’re trusting her when she doesn’t have the willpower of a gnat. Sooner or later Lindsay will go back to her old ways—and you’ll be the one who learns why you can’t say yes to her.”
“But, Mom—” Allison said again.
Donna had held up her hand. “Let me finish. You know why I know that? Because it happened to me. For years and years, you covered up my drinking. But that didn’t really help me. It just put off the inevitable. It’s called codependency, Allison. And the more I helped your sister, the more I was helping her self-destruct. That’s not helping. That’s hurting.”
Now Allison looked at Lindsay, at her hollow, lined face, and hoped that she was helping her sister more than she was hurting her. That she was making the right choice.
Barbur Bargain Motel
J
enna was tired of how Cassidy Shaw, Channel Four’s crime reporter, was always going on about how young Jenna was. Like that was a bad thing. Everyone knew that if you were young, you had more energy. You had more to prove. You worked harder. Jenna didn’t sit around complaining about having already paid her dues. She was willing to do whatever it took to get ahead, even if it meant getting her hands dirty.
And it was paying off. If Marcy had taken that call, she probably would have only pretended to listen, writing the guy off as one of the crazies. But Jenna—Jenna knew a lead when she heard it.
The story that the caller—Joey—had told her was this: An old friend, a woman named Sissy, had hired him to burn down a woman’s house. Which he did. And got paid five hundred dollars. But now Sissy had called Joey again. She wanted to meet to discuss a new “favor” he could do for her.
And Joey was afraid he knew what the favor was. “This time, I think Sissy wants me to kill this lady,” he said as Jenna frantically scribbled everything down.
“Now who is this woman exactly?” Jenna asked. “Not Sissy, the other one. The one whose house Sissy had you burn down.”
A beep sounded in her ear, meaning someone else was calling Channel Four, but she ignored it. Let it go to voice mail. This was a story! This was news!
And now it would be Jenna’s big break.
“She’s Sissy’s boyfriend’s ex. I guess Sissy doesn’t like that he has to pay this lady alimony. Something like that.”
“Has Sissy told you that’s why she wants to meet?” Jenna asked. “Because she wants you to kill this woman?”
“She didn’t come out and say it. But she didn’t need to. Sissy, man— she’s crazy. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but she’s done some bad, bad things. That’s why I need some protection. I need someone else knowing about this. And if she ends up asking me to do what I think she will, I need some insurance.”
Jenna wrestled with her conscience for several long seconds before she said, “Why not go to the cops?”
“The cops? Look, lady, I just admitted to you that I’ve committed a crime. Arson. That’s a Class 2 felony. And I already have a record. If I go to them now, they aren’t going to care about what Sissy
might
want in the future. They’re going to care about how I just admitted I burned down this real house in real life. But if you tape this thing, the way you said, then
you
can take it to the cops. And maybe I won’t even have to talk to them at all. Maybe they won’t even need to know about the other thing.”
A Peabody. Maybe even an Emmy. Jenna’s heart quickened as she imagined stepping to the podium to pick up the gold statuette of a winged woman holding an atom. She could almost hear the murmurings from the audience. “She’s the youngest ever to . . .”
She realized Joey was still talking.
T
wo days later, Jenna pressed her ear against the wall of the Barbur Bargain Motel (“Rooms by the day or week”) listening to the low murmur of voices in the next room. One voice was lower than the other. Joey and the woman he knew as Elizabeth—Sissy—Hewsom. A Google search had turned up nothing on her. Nothing. When even dead people and ghosts were on the Internet.
Jenna had only Joey’s word about Sissy’s previous crimes. He told her that Sissy had developed a plan at the Spurling Institute to have her records expunged once she reached adulthood. So was that what had happened? Had she gotten out of Spurling and changed her name? Or was Joey wrong about the crimes or even the woman herself? Until she heard the second voice, Jenna had even wondered if there actually
was
a Sissy.
As she listened to the murmur of their conversation, Jenna just hoped that Joey was making sure Sissy spoke plainly about what she wanted done.
Because every word, every gesture would be captured by the hidden camera and microphone disguised as a smoke detector that Jenna had bought at I Spy Shoppe and then installed herself last night. She had perched on the single rickety chair she dragged into the middle of the room to serve as a makeshift stepladder. When she was satisfied that it didn’t look out of place, she went back to the second room where she slept restlessly.
Besides allowing her to be in place the day before, renting the second room let Jenna know when the conversation began and ended. Otherwise, she might have had to slouch down in a car in the parking lot, hiding behind dark glasses and a newspaper. Standing out like a unicorn in a herd of zebras.
Their conversation seemed to go on forever. But finally there was a silence. And then Jenna heard a car start up in the parking lot. A minute later, another engine coughed to life. Taking a risk, she twitched the curtain a half inch. Enough that she could see Joey’s gold El Camino following another car out of the parking lot.
To be safe, Jenna gave it another ten minutes. She peeked outside. The coast was clear. Just a housekeeper’s cart at the end of the row.
She used the second room key to slip inside. The room was empty. Jenna was dragging the chair back to the center of the room when a knock on the door made her jump.
“Housekeeping,” a woman called in a heavy accent.
“It’s okay. I don’t need anything.”
The knock came again. “Housekeeping!”
Jenna moved closer to the door. “I don’t need anything.”
“Housekeeping.” The woman sounded like she had memorized a single English word.
“Nothing.” Jenna tried again. “Nada.”
A flurry of knocks. Frustrated, she looked out the peephole. All she could see was the pile of white towels the woman held in her arms.
With a sigh, she opened the door. “I told you, I don’t need—”
A sudden push knocked her off balance. The towels tumbled to the floor like a soft white waterfall.
Jenna stumbled backward, her eyes on the woman who slammed the door behind her with one foot while both hands held a gun. A big gun.
Pointed right at Jenna.
Bertie Lou’s Café
L
eif dug a fork into his omelet. Everything at Bertie Lou’s could be accused of overkill. Did an omelet really need ham, bacon, cheddar cheese, green pepper, onion, garlic,
and
gravy? Except once you tasted it, you realized it did.