The One I Left Behind (17 page)

“What?” Tara said, so excited that she spilled soda all over her shirt. “When?”

“Just a couple hours ago.” Charlie watched as Tara lifted the dry lower edge of her shirt and used it to pat down the wet area, right over her chest. They could see her bare belly and the tiny bit of her black bra. Charlie looked like he was holding his breath.

“He’s picking up the pace,” Tara said excitedly. “Last time there was, what . . . a week or more between killing Andrea McFerlin and leaving Candace Jacques’s hand? It’s only been three days this time.”

Charlie nodded. “You know what my dad told me . . . he said he thinks this guy’s just getting started. He’s got a real taste for it now. It’s like an addiction. He won’t be able to stop.”

Reggie gave a little involuntary shiver. “Do they have any idea whose hand it is?”

“Don’t know,” Charlie said, taking a long sip of soda.

Tara reached into the pocket of her jeans and fiddled with something—the doll shoe probably.

“Has your dad said anything else about the case? Any suspects? A connection between the ladies he killed? I mean, do they even know the killer’s a man?” Tara asked, firing off the questions rapidly, letting them slam into each other. “Maybe it’s a woman, or a couple, or a crazy Satanic cult or something.” Her eyes were huge as she leaned toward toward Charlie, waiting for his response.

Charlie shook his head. “He hasn’t told me anything. Just the addiction thing he said as he was leaving today. To tell you the truth, I’m kind of worried about him.” Charlie set down his soda and began picking at loose thread on his shorts. “He’s barely eating. Not sleeping much. When he’s home, he’s shut up in his office. I guess I should be grateful that he’s off my back, but it’s weird the way he’s become kind of like the Invisible Dad. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and he’s not here—he’s gone into work at like two in the morning. He looks like a freaking zombie.”

Reggie looked over at the shelves and studied the school photos of Charlie, snapshots of family vacations. Charlie had his mother’s eyes and nose. She’d been a slight woman with huge brown eyes, blond hair, and a toothy smile. There were also pictures of Stu Berr in his police uniform, and before that, in the army. He’d served as a medic in Vietnam. He was, Reggie guessed, about fifty pounds lighter back then. There was a snapshot of Stu and a bunch of other uniformed men standing in front of an ambulance, all holding tin cups, raising them into the air in a toast. They all had tired, haunted looks beneath their helmets, and wore heavy flak jackets, with what looked like a hundred pounds of gear strapped to them. And what were they toasting? Reggie wondered. Getting the hell out of Vietnam? The life that would come after, she imagined, glancing at the other photos—the wife, the son, the little green house, the promotion to detective?

“So he’s got an office here? Can we take a peek?” Tara asked, doing her best to sound nonchalant.

Charlie shook his head. “No freaking way. My dad would shoot me. Besides, he keeps it locked.”

“Seriously?” Tara asked.

“He’s got guns and shit in there. And confidential police papers. He’s gotta keep it locked.”

Tara made a sour face. “We could try picking it. If it’s an easy lock, I might be able to do it with a bobby pin.” She started looking through her bag. “I’m sure I’ve got one in here somewhere.”

Reggie thought about Tara going into Andrea McFerlin’s house. Had the back door really been open or had Tara picked the lock? The cut on her leg stung and she rubbed at it through her jeans, looked over at Tara, remembering the crisscrossed lines of scars on Tara’s leg.

“Is that why you came over?” Charlie snarled. “To look through my dad’s crap?”

Tara closed her bag and shook her head. “Nah. We came because we missed you. Now quit being a paranoid spaz.”

“Well, forget about the office,” Charlie said. “He’s got a huge padlock on the door.”

“Maybe—” Tara started to say.

Charlie interrupted her, eyes flashing with anger. “No way. I’m not even gonna let you try.”

“That’s fine,” Tara said. “Whatever.”

They were all silent for a minute. Tara tapped her chipped blue nails on her Coke can. She was bouncing her legs up and down, unable to hold still.

“I know,” Tara said, her body still for the moment. “Let’s play a game. Close your eyes, Charlie.”

He stared at her for a few seconds, then closed his eyes.

“Good boy,” she said. “Keep ’em closed nice and tight.” Tara slid off the couch and made her way over to the chair where Reggie was sitting. She put a finger over her lips,
Shh,
then straddled Reggie’s legs and leaned forward, and for half a second, Reggie thought Tara was going to kiss her. Instead, she gave her a crooked smile—a we’re-sharers-of-deep-secrets-smile—and put her hands gently around Reggie’s neck. Reggie looked up, a what-the-hell look, and Tara mouthed,
It’s okay. Trust me
.

“Open your eyes, Charlie,” she said.

“Tara, what are you —”

“I’m Neptune,” Tara said, tightening her grip around Reggie’s neck. The smile was gone now and her eyes looked dark and cruel. Her hands were cold and smelled like cigarettes. “And I’m giving you one minute to save my latest victim. Tell me why I do what I do.”

“This is stupid, Tara,” Charlie said.

“Answer the question,” she instructed, tightening her grip. Reggie tried to swallow and couldn’t. She held perfectly still, tried not to even breathe.

“Because it’s an addiction,” Charlie said impatiently.

“And?” Tara squeezed just a little tighter. Reggie made a gagging sound and reached up to pull Tara’s hands off her. She gripped Tara’s wrists, pulled and twisted, but Tara held tight.

“Quit it, Tara! You’re hurting her!” Charlie said, jumping up off the couch.

“Stay back and play by the rules, or she’s dead. I’m not Tara, I’m Neptune,” she hissed, voice deep and gravelly. When she spoke again it was a shout, “
Now why do I do what I do
?”

Reggie felt light-headed. She dug her nails into Tara’s wrists, tried to speak, but no words would come. She was inside a tunnel and there at the end of it, looking down at her, was Tara. Only she wasn’t Tara. She was a Neptune. A man with a shadowy face and lobster claws for hands—it wasn’t skin she was pinching and pulling on, not human wrists but a hideous exoskeleton.

“Tara!” Charlie grabbed her around the waist, yanking her off Reggie and throwing her to the floor. Reggie gasped, sucked in air. Her hands flew protectively to her aching neck, her crushed windpipe.

“You fucking idiot,” Charlie said, pinning Tara’s wrists to the ground, sitting on her hips so that she couldn’t move.

Tara smiled up at him. “You feel it now, don’t you?” Tara asked. “It’s power, pure and simple. The girl’s under you, her life is in your hands. It gives you a big old hard-on and there’s only one release. You’ve gotta kill her. And when you do, the whole universe is there in your hands. You’re like God.”

Chapter 15

October 17, 2010

Brighton Falls, Connecticut

R
EGGIE WOKE UP IN
a cold sweat, heart pounding. She’d dreamed she was tied up in a dark cave and that someone was slipping a ring onto her finger. Then chopping her hand off.

Until death do us part
.

“Shit,” she said, sitting up in her childhood bed, under the same quilt she’d slept under growing up—a Drunkard’s Path pattern her grandmother had made. The grandmother she’d never met, who’d died giving birth to Vera. When Reggie was a little girl, she’d heard the story and pictured her mother exploding out of her grandmother’s belly, like it was the force of Vera’s very being that killed Monique somehow.

Reggie looked down at the pattern, remembered her mother staggering through the front door, straight for Reggie, curling up beside her, breathing gin-soaked secrets under the quilt. Drunkard’s Path.

The quilt, once a vibrant red and white, had faded to blotchy pink and dingy yellow. Reggie could see the tiny stitches done by hand connecting the blocks together, making the shapes into a path that seemed to stagger and sway.

Reggie stared up at the ceiling, the plaster crumbling and water stained. The roof must have been leaking for some time. Some of the stains were built of many rings, reminding Reggie of a topographical map. She studied the imaginary landscape on the ceiling, picturing mountains and valleys, wondering what it would be like to live there.

The door to her room creaked—she looked over and saw it closing slowly. Someone was behind it, out in the hall.

“Hello? Lorraine? Mom?” There was a shuffling sound, footsteps going back down the hall.

Her cell phone began to buzz. She rolled over, reaching it off the bedside table, and saw the glowing numbers on the digital clock: 7:32. Shit. She rarely slept past six. The phone vibrated in her hand and she checked the display: Len.

“Hey, you,” she said sleepily into the phone, one eye still on the door.

“Didn’t get you up, did I?”

“Nah. You know me, the queen of the early birds.”

“How’re things in Worcester?” he asked in almost a mocking tone, like he somehow suspected she wasn’t there at all.

“Not what I expected,” Reggie answered, telling herself she was being paranoid. Len was just being goofy. There was no way he could know she was lying to him. Still, guilt gnawed at her belly, and as good as it was to talk to him, she was eager to get off the phone before he picked up on it.

“And is that a good thing or a bad thing?” he asked.

“Hard to say.”

“Mmm,” Len said. He was silent a minute, waiting. She heard one of his cats meow, listened as he picked up his coffee and took a sip.

Reggie squirmed, switched the phone to her other ear.

“I’ll call you when I get back to town,” she said. “We can have that picnic.”

“Sounds like a plan,” he agreed.

“Talk soon, then.”

“Reg?”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing.” He sighed. “I’ll see you when you get back.”

She got out of bed and stretched. The room was the same way she’d left it, which was damn creepy. There was a framed M. C. Escher print above her bed—
Drawing Hands
: a lithograph of three-dimensional hands drawing themselves into existence. Some of her sketches were still on the bulletin board, including a self-portrait she’d done in charcoal—the lines blurred, her eyes two dark hollows: a ghostly raccoon girl looking up from the paper, asking her future self why she’d come back.

Reggie turned from the drawing, opened the closet door, and found the few pieces of clothing she’d left behind when she went off to college. There, on the top shelf, right where she’d left it, was the memory box.

A month after her mother’s hand was found, Reggie was sent to a counselor who specialized in grieving. He was a doughy-faced young man with sad eyes who was fond of argyle sweaters. One of the exercises he had her do was to make a memory box: a special treasure box full of Vera memorabilia. Reggie had used one of her grandfather’s old wooden cigar boxes, and, following the dough-boy’s instructions, had stuffed it full of things that would always remind her of her mother. Then she’d buried it on a shelf at the top of her closet and left it behind when she ran off to start a new life. Not exactly what the grief counselor had had in mind, but it worked for Reggie.

Reggie reached up and lifted the box down, blowing a layer of dust off the top. There was a full-busted, scantily clad woman on the label, leaning against a large globe. With trembling fingers, Reggie opened the hinged lid, peered in, and saw a jumble of notes, matchbooks, a folded page torn from an old magazine—her mother, the Aphrodite Cold Cream girl.
Treat Yourself Like a Goddess
.

Reggie snapped the lid closed and tucked the box back up on the shelf.

The room felt stuffy and airless. Reggie went to the window and tried to lift it, but it was stuck shut. She was about to pound on the bottom of the frame, then glanced down at the bandages from yesterday’s window glass mishap and thought better of it.

She pulled on a pair of jeans, grabbed her messenger bag, and went into the hallway, stopping to peer in at her mother, who was fast asleep. Vera’s mouth hung open, lips and chin crusted with sticky, white drool. The door to Tara’s room was closed, and she walked up to it, listening, but no sound came from the other side.

Reggie slipped down the stairs, carefully avoiding the ones that creaked—her body on autopilot, remembering little details she hadn’t thought of in years.

The kitchen was tidy but still smelled like smoke. She set her bag down by the table and inspected the damaged drywall—it would be an easy repair. She’d also need to take measurements and buy glass to fix the dining room window. She’d pick up materials when she went into town.

After searching through Lorraine’s carefully arranged cupboards, she finally came upon an old Mr. Coffee machine, a box of filters, and half a can of Chock full o’Nuts. God only knew how long it had been sitting in the cupboard, but it was better than nothing. While the coffee sputtered and perked, Reggie pulled out her sketch pad and made some notes. She made a grocery list, a reminder to go to a building supply place for window glass, drywall, tape, and Spackle, and to call the social worker to get the name and number of the shelter where Vera had been staying. She wrote down the name
Sister Dolores
and circled it. Then added,
Learn and clean and serve
.

There was a low knocking sound and Reggie froze, looking up at the ceiling, wondering who’d gotten up. Then she heard it again, louder this time. It was coming from the front door. Smoothing her hair, she went to the door, glanced through the window, and saw a young man in a cheap suit with overly large ears. A salesman? Or Jehovah’s Witness, maybe? Curiosity got the better of her and she cracked the door.

“Can I help you?”

He showed her a badge, and she had to work to hide her surprise. “Detective Edward Levi, Brighton Falls Police. I was hoping I could speak with Ms. Dufrane.” His large ears were redder than his face.