“Jane…
please
don’t leave like this. I’ve got something to show you…”
She dug his truck keys out of her jean pocket and threw them at him. “Fuck you,” she muttered under her breath as she stormed out.
Back in front of the B&B, her Mustang had returned to its former self, minus the bloody message on the trunk. Released
as part of a crime scene, she could now regain her freedom. Yes, this is what felt normal to Jane Perry. She was alone again, but she was back in charge of her predictable life. She headed up the stairs and met Mollie midway, who was headed down with a basket of dirty clothes.
“You didn’t come home last night,” Mollie said, with a pensive look.
“Yeah?”
The kid looked at her shirt on Jane and smiled. She leaned closer and whispered. “Did my shirt get lucky last night?”
The sound of a door opening and closing was heard upstairs. Mollie quickly skipped down the steps as Jane stepped aside for Edward Butterworth to make his way downstairs.
“Morning,” he curtly offered, brushing past her with his meticulous three-piece suit and monogrammed attaché case in hand.
“Mr. Butterworth,” Jane quickly said. Butterworth turned around, looking irritated that someone had the gall to stop his forward progress. “I need to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“It’s about Jordan Copeland.”
“Well, it’ll have to wait. I’m heading over there now and then I’m leaving for Denver to catch my plane.”
“I just need a second of your time.”
“Funny about that. When someone asks for a ‘second,’ it’s invariably longer and usually an imposition.” With that, the old guy continued down the stairs and out the door.
Shaking her head in disgust, Jane bolted up the stairs and into her room. The first thing she saw was the photo of her mother and Harry she’d slid under her laptop. She brought it out and looked at it. The possibilities were too stark and she quickly lifted her laptop and hid the photo underneath it.
She took a quick shower and washed her hair, all the time working hard to keep Hank out of her head. She told herself that she’d lost precious time by hanging out with him and silently
berated herself for allowing herself to become weak and vulnerable. As she’d always suspected, vulnerability was a sharp sword onto which one impales oneself and suffers needless wounds to the heart. By the time she got out of the shower, she’d resolved to never let it happen again and began the proverbial process of locking up her heart against any further gatecrashers.
To that end, she didn’t hesitate when she reached for her standard navy blue poplin shirt. She told herself how ridiculous she’d looked in Mollie’s youthful garb and that she was, back on familiar ground and back in charge of her reality again. Yet, Jane wasn’t really paying attention as she buttoned the shirt because one-by-one, the white buttons popped off the fabric. It wasn’t until the third one hit the floor that she realized that the shirt was useless. She stripped it off and grabbed the remaining poplin shirt off the hanger. This one buttoned up just fine. But as she straightened the collar, she was met with an unforgiving sharp prick in her neck and across her back. It felt as if tiny needles were impaling her flesh. Quickly removing the shirt, she examined the collar and back material. Her eyes could see nothing but when she ran her fingers across the fabric, she was met with what felt like knife-like daggers that drew several drops of blood from her fingertips. This was truly insane. “Fuck!” she screamed, flailing the shirt against the wall.
Whatever was conspiring against her would not win, she decided. She
had
to revert to the safety of what she knew, no matter how much that journey would validate her suffering and belief that she only attracted shitty situations and shittier men. But she was left with the option of wearing her nightshirt again and that didn’t seem reasonable. She reluctantly looked through the hangers of remaining shirts that Mollie loaned her. All that was left that she hadn’t worn were dressier numbers, brimming with lace collars and embroidered hems. Jane let out a tired sigh and chose the only one of the group that she knew she could strap her Glock across without ruining the fabric.
She turned to the mirror above the desk to comb out her
hair when she looked down at her laptop. There, sitting
on top
of the computer, was the photo of Anne and Harry. She’d put it underneath the computer. At least, she thought she had. With all the confusion in her head, she was probably mistaken. So, this time, she opened her laptop, flung the photo on top of the keyboard and slammed the top shut.
Focus
, she told herself.
Bury your feelings
.
Bury the hurt.
She would systemically erase the events of the last fourteen or so hours. It wasn’t just Hank. She’d expunge the brutal visual of her young mother’s naked and bloody body crying about how she lost “her.”
Even when she told her mother that “It’s
your
grief” and she felt it like a shock of understanding after awakening from a long coma, she would bury it.
Even when her mother let go of her and told her to “have the courage to see what follows,” she would ignore it.
The walls would once again be built around her.
Jane pulled on her jeans and boots, strapped her holster gingerly across the delicate fabric of the shirt, grabbed her cell phone and turned to the door. “Holy shit!” she exclaimed as she looked down on the carpet. It was that damn photo again. And with it, came the enveloping aroma of gardenias that was determined to get her attention. As stubborn as Jane was to hold an unknown future at arm’s length, another force was surprisingly more intractable to prevent that from happening. There was only one way to put this to rest. And while the thought of it scared the hell out of her, she knew she had no choice.
CHAPTER 31
Jane arrived at the County Recorder’s office on the outskirts of Midas just as they opened the doors for business. She stood and waited while the heavyset woman waddled across the
room and slid the glass open at the counter.
“You keep the records here of birth and death records?”
“That’s right.”
“How about a stillborn? Would that be recorded?”
“That depends how the mother wanted to handle it. What year are we talking?”
Jane couldn’t believe she was doing this. “1967. The name is Anne LeRóy.” Jane spelled it out, including the accent over the
o.
The woman saw the holstered Glock. “Is this related to a case?”
“No. It’s my mother.” When Jane said those words, the reality hit hard. The woman crossed over to a long line of grey file cabinets and spent a good five minutes searching before she revealed a thin green file. The woman opened it and silently read through the few papers before walking back to the window.
“You can’t take the file,” the woman advised.
Jane’s heart raced. “Yeah. I know,” she said, pulling the file toward her and opening it. She suddenly felt light headed as she stared at the page.
“Are you all right, honey?” the woman asked, clearly concerned by Jane’s reaction.
Jane read the few telling lines on the page again before closing it and handing it back to the woman. Without saying a word, Jane turned and left the building.
The stream of smoke curled precipitously out of the stretch of sheltered green space that sat at the rear of the B&B property. She didn’t hear the footsteps approaching until it was too late.
“What are you doing?” Mollie asked in a slightly stunned tone.
Jane took a hard puff on that last cigarette she’d been holding back. “Sedating myself. What does it look like?”
Mollie kneeled down to where Jane was seated. Jane hadn’t
noticed the thin book in her hand up until then. “Did something happen?” she asked, her chin trembling. “Did you find Jake?”
Jane pulled out of her self-imposed destruction and put a reassuring hand on Mollie’s thigh. “No. It’s got nothing to do with Jake.”
“So, why are you screwing up your life again after five days of staying off those things?”
“Habit.” Jane took another meaningful drag, holding the nicotine in her lungs.
Mollie sat across from Jane cross-legged, laying the book on the ground. “I looked on that website you told me about.” Her face was subdued. “You know,
mysecretrevelations
? I read the posts by the fifteen-year-old boy like you asked me to.”
Jane took a hit. “And?”
“You’re right. That was Jake’s writing. It sounded just like him.” Mollie drew circles in the dirt with her finger. “What do you think he meant on that last one? The one where he wrote,
I saw you but you didn’t see me, you fucking pervert! Which one of us will hang in hell?
”
Jane’s restrained manner mirrored Mollie’s. The events of her life and this case were starting to take their toll. “I don’t know.”
“I was thinking about that sketchpad of Jake’s you showed me…the one of the old man hanging himself in that prison cell? I couldn’t get it out of my head. I’ve been reading this book that Jake gave me. He told me it had a lot of answers to a lot of questions.” Mollie drew the book toward her and opened it to a page of highlighted text. “I don’t understand a lot of it, but on some level, it kinda speaks to me, you know? Like here, when he says,
Suffering with a problem is easier to bear than a resolution. That has to do with the fact that suffering and continuing to carry a problem are deeply bound to a feeling of innocence and loyalty at a magical level
.” Jane sat up, letting her cigarette ember die. Mollie turned the page. “This one I liked.
People don’t become ill
as a result of repressing anger, but as a result of repressing action that would lead to resolution
. He talks a lot about
entanglements
with family members who are dead. I don’t know why, but that just put a shiver down my spine!” Mollie searched through the thin book. “I can’t find the page, but he was talking about how we unconsciously get entangled with the dead family member and take over their fate and live it out without even realizing that what we’re doing isn’t coming from
us
but
through them.
A lot of it has to do with family secrets. Like, if a child is given away, even way back in your family tree, and no one talks about it, then a future member of that family starts acting as though they’ve been abandoned.” Mollie leaned forward. “It’s wild, you know? But without knowing about that entanglement, the future person in the family tree can’t find a resolution in their life. It’s like, whoever’s been left out or ignored or hidden away, has to be brought back into the picture. And that person then becomes a kind of…
protector
…yeah, that’s the word he used, for the person who lives today and has been entangled in the other one’s fate. It’s all about restoring order out of chaos. One or more family members will repeat the fate and patterns of another who’s dead and gone without knowing why these things are happening to them.” Mollie found the page she was looking for. “Here. Listen to this:
When an injustice has occurred in an earlier generation, a future group member will suffer in an attempt to restore order in that group. There is a sort of systemic drive to repeat the occurrence.
But what he says later is that it never brings order. The only thing that stops the unconscious patterns and makes one stop struggling is to tell the dead,
I honor you, you have a place in my heart. I’ll speak out and name the injustice done to you so it can heal.
”
Jane grabbed the book from Mollie’s hands. She glanced through it. “Why was Jake reading this kind of book?”
“I don’t know. He read lots of books that were outside the norm.”
“With
this
kind of intellectual subject matter? He just
happened on it?”
Jane’s behavior worried Mollie. “What’s wrong? You’re saying it’s all bullshit?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I wanted to know where he got this book!” Jane turned the pages one after the other until she reached the inside back cover. It was the second time that morning that her jaw dropped from something she read.
On the lower edge of the cover, written in pen, in small print and in virtually indecipherable letters were the words,
Property of Jordan Copeland.
Jane took the book and bolted from the tree-cloaked strip of greenery. As she rounded the front of the B&B, she met Edward Butterworth as he was getting out of his car and heading back inside. “Mr. Butterworth!” Jane called out to him but the old man kept walking.
“I can’t talk to you, Miss. I’ve got to retrieve my bag, get to the post office and drive to the airport.”
Jane stood in front of him, barring his progress. “I can run up and get your bag faster than you can. And in the time you save, you can spend one minute talking to me.” Butterworth eyed her Glock and reluctantly nodded. Jane raced up the stairs and entered Butterworth’s room—the only other room up there besides Weyler and Jane’s. She grabbed his small suitcase and dashed back down the stairs, meeting him on the sidewalk in front of his rental car. “You said you came here to make an assessment on Jordan,” Jane stated, slightly out of breath.
“That’s correct.”
“As an officer of the law, you are compelled to tell me what that assessment is.” Jane was bluffing and hoped the Copeland clean up man would fall for it.
Butterworth opened the back door of his sedan and slid his suitcase onto the seat. “I’ve known that boy since before he was born. He was trouble from the second the doctor smacked him on the ass.” He slammed the back door of his sedan and opened
the driver’s door. “Nothing has changed.”
Jane held the driver’s door open. “So, what you’re saying is that in your opinion, Jordan Copeland killed Daniel Marshall and is responsible in some way for the disappearance of Jake Van Gorden?”
He sat in the driver’s seat. “That’s exactly what I’m saying! I’m finished with this son-of-a-bitch! This is the last time my shadow will dim his doorstep. I’m turning my duties over to my son who works in our firm.” Butterworth retrieved a small stack of mail from the visor and used it as a prop to make his point. “And when I return to New York, mark my words, I am going to make sure that he finds any and all loopholes in this trust so that it
immediately
becomes revocable. That worthless felon is not going to have the Copelands’ money as a goddamned cushion any longer! He needs to suffer,” Butterworth exclaimed, waving the stack of mail toward Jane, “and I’m just the bastard who can make that happen!” He jabbed the stack of mail one more time in Jane’s direction to make his point crystal clear before he slammed the door. Yet, before the door closed, one of the letters in the stack fell out and landed on the asphalt. Butterworth backed out of the parking space as Jane picked up the letter. She called after Butterworth, waving the envelope at him to get his attention but he was quite done talking to her.