CHAPTER TEN
CHARLOTTE
S
tan doesn’t tell my father anything more than that I’ve had car trouble, I stumbled in a hole on the side of the road, and I’m sitting on his porch.
That means the story is going to have to come from me.
This sucks.
I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but my father doesn’t roll up Stan’s driveway in a police cruiser.
My brother Ben does.
He shakes hands with Stan, then puts his hands on his hips and looks at me with this whole condescending
what-are-we-gonna-do-with-you
look.
It’s probably three thousand times kinder than the look my father is going to give me when he sees me, so I don’t glare back. I shift to the edge of the chair. Despite the Advil and the ice, my ankle has blown up like a balloon.
Ben looks at it and gives a low whistle. “Dad said you might need to go back to the hospital. I thought he was being ironic.”
“Don’t just stand there,” I snap, trying to keep my voice from descending into surly. “Help me up.”
Ben pulls my arm around his shoulders and hauls me to my feet, letting me hop along on my good leg. It’s as awkward as it would have been if Thomas had done the same thing, but at least we’re on level ground, not navigating our way through underbrush.
As Ben gets me into the front seat, he says, “Dad told me where you left the car. How on earth did you get all the way here?”
I turn my head and look out the passenger side window. “I’m pretty sure you don’t want to know.”
“I’m pretty sure you need to tell me. Buckle your seatbelt.” He starts the ignition, but I know from experience that he won’t put the car into gear until I’m buckled in. I heave a sigh and drag the nylon strap across my chest. My ankle is throbbing, and now I’m completely irritated.
Gravel crunches under the car as we pull down the driveway. Ben’s police radio chirps updates intermittently. I know most of the codes, just from living with it for so long, but I don’t know all of them.
“You’re not talking,” he says as we pull onto the road. He glances over.
I purse my lips and keep my eyes locked on the window.
His radio squawks at him. “Car eight-one-two, what’s your status?”
I glance over, and Ben picks up the microphone to speak into it. “Suspect in custody. En route to Southern Maryland Hospital Center. Over.”
“Ha ha,” I say. “Just take me to the station.”
“Your ankle could double for a wiffle-ball bat. You’re getting an X-ray.”
“Ben—”
He snaps his fingers and points at me. “Talk. Tell me what happened. Then we can smooth it over for Dad.”
I hate being ordered around. I glare at him. “Did one of you punch Thomas? That’s a detail you left out yesterday.”
“You might remember that he knocked Danny on the ground yesterday.”
“That’s different. Danny was—he was—”
“Yeah? Danny was what? Trying to keep a murderer away from you?”
“
He is not a murderer!
” I’m seething now. “You shouldn’t have hit him.”
“No kidding. I think that’s the whole reason they were able to get a harassment complaint to stick.” His radio squawks again, and he flips a dial to turn the volume down.
Shock steals my voice for a moment. “It was you? You hit him?”
His eyes don’t leave the road. “No. It was Matt.”
Wow.
Ben glances my way. “I think he wanted to take the kid’s head off. He’s lucky he doesn’t have a broken jaw.”
I don’t have anything to say to that.
Ben taps me on the back of the head, a total brother move. His voice, however, is gentle. “We care about you, little sis. That was—I don’t ever want to see you like that again.”
He means it. I can hear the love in his voice.
“Come on,” he says, his tone cajoling now. “What happened with the car?”
I study the array of controls on the dashboard. My voice comes out very small. “You’ll think I’m an idiot.”
“
Talk
.” Ben’s photograph could be used in a Wikipedia entry about kindness, but he has a limit. I’ve hit it.
I sigh. “Thomas was trying to get a job at Lauders. They wouldn’t even let him fill out an application. They practically chased him out of the store.”
He doesn’t say anything to that, and I don’t offer more. Trees and houses fly by.
“
And
. . .” he prompts.
“And I felt bad.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I felt bad. I followed him.”
Ben doesn’t explode the way Danny would. He doesn’t lecture the way Matt would. He just gets quiet for a mile or two. “That’s a little nuts, Char.”
“I know. But some of it’s my fault. I started it at the funeral—”
“Your
fault
? Are you crazy? None of this is your fault. That guy might have
killed his mother
, Charlotte. Do you have any idea what it sounds like when you tell me you followed him? That you were
alone
with him?” He hits the steering wheel, in a very un-Ben-like show of frustration. “I want to drive you home and put a lock on your bedroom door.”
My father might actually do that. “Thomas didn’t hurt me.”
Ben flinches a little at the use of his name. “It doesn’t help your case that I practically had to carry you to the car.”
“He
actually
had to carry me through the woods. He had plenty of opportunity, and he didn’t hurt me.”
Ben draws a tight breath, and he glances over at me again. His eyes take in the mud, the torn dress. He’s seeing me with new eyes, and he’s drawing the wrong conclusions.
He clinches it when he says, “Forget what I said. There’s no way to smooth this over with Dad. I didn’t realize you were with that guy in the woods. I didn’t know he
touched you.
I don’t know what I thought happened—I don’t know what you’re thinking anymore, Charlotte. I don’t know—”
“I don’t know why you all think I’m some wispy little thing who needs to be protected! He’s never done anything to anyone here!”
“Do you even hear what you’re saying?”
“He just lost his mother, Ben.”
“Little sister, you are out of your head.”
I fold my arms across my chest. The worst part is that I know he’s right. Sitting here now, repeating the events in my brain, I know he’s right. If Nicole were telling me about how she followed an accused murderer through the woods, I’d go ballistic. I can’t even defend myself. What am I going to say?
Come on, Ben, he doesn’t
seem
guilty.
Because, you know, cops have never heard that before.
“Are you sure he didn’t slip you something?” Ben says. “What about yesterday? The tox screen came back negative, but—”
“Of course not!” I snap. “He didn’t even give me the glass of iced tea until he was calling Stan to come home.”
“You accepted a
drink
from him? I swear to god, Charlotte—”
“Enough! Okay?” I hear the worry through his words, and my voice breaks. I can only imagine what my mother will sound like. “Enough.”
You accepted a drink from him
.
Ben is right. At the same time, even though my actions were stupid, they don’t feel
wrong
. Even when Thomas got angry, I didn’t feel like he was going to throw me to the ground and bash my head in with a rock—and he was obviously strong enough for it.
“I’m sorry,” Ben eventually says. His voice is hollow. “You’re my sister. I can’t . . . I don’t want you to get hurt. That could have been a very different call we got. Especially after yesterday. You know?”
I swallow. “I know.”
“I got a call like that once before. That was bad enough.”
Lilly Mauta. The girl who was strangled.
He finally turns onto the highway, and the thrum of road noise fills the car. He doesn’t have lights or siren on, but people get out of our way, and he flies in the left lane. Sometimes it’s great riding in a police car.
I fidget, picking at a line in the upholstery. “Are you sure there’s no connection between that murder and this one?”
He looks at me. “Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“
Yeah
.”
I let that sit there for a while, but I have to pick at it. “How can you be sure? You never caught the guy.”
“You don’t want details.”
“Actually, I think I do.”
“Fine. I don’t want to
give
you details.”
“There are two strangulations within thirty miles of each other, and you don’t think there’s a
possibility
that it could be the same person?”
“I’m not doing this.”
Ben’s practically a saint, but he’s a stubborn one. I punch him in the shoulder. “Come on.”
“Come on, what? I’m not a detective. All I know is what I saw when I found her.”
“And you don’t remember.”
“No. I remember all of it.” He sounds haunted, and I wonder if memories invade his dreams. “Too much of it.”
I can’t needle him now. I won’t be cruel to him. I turn my eyes back to the window.
After a while, he clears his throat and speaks into the silence. “With Lilly Mauta . . . it looked like a boyfriend.”
His tone is level and even, his cop voice. Detached but not emotionless. The voice he uses to read Miranda rights or deliver bad news.
He glances over, as if to make sure I’m still listening. “Her parents had never seen her with anyone, but there were emails indicating she’d had a secret relationship. We interviewed one guy from the local community college whose name matched the emails, but he didn’t even know her, and we couldn’t trace the email account as belonging to him. Her house had an alarm system, and she’d disabled it to allow someone inside. There were no defensive wounds. We found a used condom in her trash can. It was done with a belt pressed over her throat. Honestly, Char, it’s like she lay there and let someone do that to her. Or maybe it was an accident. Some people do crazy things when they’re chasing a thrill. Maybe the guy realized she wasn’t breathing anymore, and he panicked and ran.”
Part of me wishes he could suck those words back into his mouth. I don’t want to know all these details about the shy, innocent girl who used to
plie
next to me at the barre. “She wasn’t even sixteen.”
“Not like that matters nowadays.”
“It matters to
me
.”
He gives me that condescending look again. I’ve seen it from all of my brothers.
We know more about the world than you do, little girl.
I hate that look.
I hate that it’s true.
“I’m assuming Marie Bellweather’s murder wasn’t anything like that.”
“No. She fought like hell.” His voice is still dispassionate. “It was done with rope. No evidence of... any other activity.”
“Did you get anything from under her fingernails?”
“A lot of clothing fibers. No skin.”
Aha! “Did they match what Thomas was wearing?”
“No.”
I brighten. “So that means—”
“That means the killer could have ditched his clothes before calling nine-one-one. Or he could have worn cloth gloves—also easy to get rid of. We’re not amateurs, Charlotte.”
“Do you have
any
evidence that Thomas did this? Any at all?”
“I’m not a detective on the case. And even if I were, I probably wouldn’t be allowed to tell you.”
“They can’t have much, or he’d be in custody.”
Ben doesn’t say anything to that, which means I’m probably right.
He glances over, and from his expression, I can tell he regrets this whole conversation. “Don’t tell Dad I told you all of that. He wouldn’t like it.”
“Don’t tell Dad I let Thomas carry me through the woods.”
He scowls. But then he says, “Deal.”
We fall into silence for the longest time.
“You’re a good brother,” I say eventually. “I’m sorry I scared you.”
He reaches over and shakes my shoulder. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
“I’m just trying to give you a lot of practice for when you have three kids like Matt.”
“Stop it. You’re scaring me again.”
I grin, glad the tension between us is dissipating. Ben always says he’s more than happy to be an uncle forever, but he loves kids, and he’s great with them. Danny will go home with anyone in a skirt, but Ben isn’t like that. He gets enough attention thanks to his boy-next-door curly hair and brown eyes, and the badge and the uniform don’t hurt, but Ben always says he’s waiting for lightning to strike.
He made fun of my hormones at the funeral, but he’s really the closet romantic.
“You know you’ll meet the right girl, and you’ll have three times as many.”
He snorts. “I’m about to drive this car off the road.”
“You don’t want nine kids?” I tease.
“I’ll just keep letting Matt have enough to share.” He glances over at me. “Please promise me you’re not going to pull a stunt like this again.”
I sober. “I promise.”
“Really, Char.”
“Really. I promise. I won’t go near him again.”
“Dad won’t send me next time.”
“There won’t
be
a next time.”
We pass a sign for the hospital, and he flicks on his turn signal. “There better not be. I wasn’t kidding about bolting your bedroom door shut.”
“I wish people would stop treating me like it’s nineteen-fifty.”
“Maybe you could save that attitude for
after
I have to carry you into the hospital, ma’am.”
“You mean you’re not going to haul me in there in handcuffs?”
Ben pulls into a parking place reserved specifically for police officers. He gives me a grin and reaches out to chuck me on the chin. “I’ll save that disgrace for next week.”