A smile tugs at my lips as the weight that’s pressed against my chest for weeks begins to ease. “Get to it, James. We’ll be playing in Reagan’s bedroom.”
It feels like a dream as I make my way down the hall. I stopped going into Reagan’s room the last few weeks because the pain was too unbearable. But with Ota here, I can feel this nightmare slowly drawing to a conclusion. I open the door to the pink sanctuary, the scent of my daughter’s hair still thick in the air. Ota takes an apprehensive tour of the room, fondling the stuffed animals that line Reagan’s bed, picking up a framed picture of the three of us—Reagan, James, and me—from off the desk. She cuts those dark eyes my way a moment with a sobering expression that if I didn’t know better come very close to hate.
“That’s okay.” The words come out breathy, Marilyn Monroe style, only my octave isn’t punctuated with lust. It’s dominated with fear. “As soon as you help us bring Reagan home, we’ll take a new picture.” Lies. The last thing I want to do is commemorate this nightmare. There’s something undoubtedly creepy about Ota, something I can’t quite pinpoint, but it puts my better judgment on notice to watch my back around the little girl.
James breezes back in, and I help Ota take a seat at the small white play table that Reagan and I used to sit at often for our famed tea parties. I take a seat across from her, and James sits on the floor, docile like a Golden Retriever. Too bad he’s not as loyal.
“You get anywhere?” He scoots in close, his hand has the nerve to thump over my thigh. But it’s warm. His thick fingers have always had the ability to make me feel safe.
I shake my head. I’m starting to lose faith we’ll ever get anywhere with her. “But she looks great.” Ota looks up at me, mean and disconcerting between bites. I clear my throat. “You look healthy. So very clean and neat. I—I’m proud of you.” What I meant to say was I hope Reagan is healthy and clean, so perfectly unsoiled looking. My heart wrenches for what she must be going through. For what they’ve both been going through.
I spot Reagan’s crayon bin in the corner. “I know!” I reach over and pull it open before plucking a handful of construction paper from off the floor. “You can color all night if you want to. Draw any picture you like. No bedtime.” My heart thumps so loud I’m half-afraid she’ll hear it, sense my fear and desperation.
“Yes.” James gives an exasperated sigh of relief. “That’s a great idea. If you can’t tell us where they held you, maybe you can draw us a picture, give us an idea of what these people look like.”
I kick him from under the table.
Moron. It was supposed to have been subliminal, something her subconscious pulled out without her knowledge. He’s probably frightened her out of the idea. There’s too much damn pressure attached to it now.
He leans in, his panting still unbearably loud. “What are we going to do?” He whispers so low, hardly audible.
Ota pushes aside the plate with her half-eaten sandwich, a dime-sized dollop of jelly still adhered to her cheek. In its place, she lands a fat stack of paper, baby blue, a color she fished out from the bottom. I push the crayon bin her way and she carefully examines them, the solemn expression on her face unchanging. She reaches in with her right hand and pulls out a red crayon—with her left she pulls out black.
An unnerving combination, blood and darkness.
“Ota?” I swallow down the nervous ball clenched in my throat. “Would you be okay if James and I left the room for a minute?”
She nods without looking up, both her hands already dancing across the page as a pattern of swirls emerges beneath her.
James takes my hand and we head back out to the hall, closing the door silently behind us. And just like that, we’re both back to panting, sweat beading at his temples, my body exploding with heat.
“Where did you find her?” I pull him in by the shirt. There is something comforting about his strong frame pressed to mine, and I wish to God he had never slept with Hailey. I don’t know if James and I have ever felt closer than we have these last few hellish weeks, and yet now Hailey and her swollen belly will forever wedge a distance between us.
“She knocked on the door.” He winces. “I went out to see my dad earlier.” His gaze shoots around the hall, the stairs, the floor. “He hinted that Monica might have something to do with Reagan’s disappearance.”
“What?”
“I went there and basically searched the house.”
My stomach bottoms out. I’m not sure why I’m so surprised, why the visceral reaction. James has a hobby of paying other women visits. It’s apparently his thing.
“You find anything?” For so long I never thought to look to my husband’s harem as people of interest in my daughter’s disappearance, and now I wonder what took me so long.
He shakes his head, but that distant look in his eyes lets me know he’s not telling the truth. “Actually, I did find something. Remember a couple of weeks ago I discovered that my father wiped the house of any trace of my mother, my brothers, and my sister?” His dimples press in, but you can see the pain in his eyes. A part of me is glad about it. A very large, childish part of me wants James to hurt just a little bit more than I do at the moment. Not that my pain can be trumped by anyone—certainly not someone willing to break their wedding vows for three weeks straight. “Monica had them stored in her attic. It was eerie. It was as if she didn’t want me to go up there, but the more she protested, the faster I ran. And there it was. Every last box of crap my mother had spent a lifetime piecing together.”
His heart riots against my hand and I step in another inch. “And your father? How is he?” How is the killer I want to ask. McCafferty all but called him out on it. As much as I like Charles, it doesn’t change the fact he could be culpable for the deaths of his child and his wife. If it’s true, he’s psychotic, and when Reagan does come home, I don’t want her to have anything to do with him.
James looks dazed as if the question is enough to set him back emotionally twenty-five years. He looks every bit the lost little boy.
“I don’t want to focus on him right now.” He pinches his eyes shut a moment. “How old do you think that little girl in there is?” His lower lip pulls down with a heavy tick as if he’s about to bawl.
“I don’t know—about Reagan’s age, a little older maybe.”
“That’s what I thought.” He tugs his neck from his collar. “I’m thinking Monica lied about the baby she had. I don’t think it died as an infant.”
“Your baby?” I take a partial step back and the air cools me slightly.
“I don’t know if Monica’s child is or was mine—but that happened long before we were together.” He offers it up like the weak consolation it is. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “That doesn’t paint me in a better light. Not sure why I went there. Hell, I do know. I’ll do anything to make things right with you. Every step from here on out matters, and I’m desperate to follow the right path this time.”
“You’re rich with children as of late, aren’t you?” I couldn’t help smearing it with the sarcastic edge it deserved. Hailey Oden and her impossible perfection will now haunt me for the rest of my natural life. I remember the day they moved in. She was the first to greet us. She wore a bathing suit, a full-brimmed hat, and sunglasses. She looked like an old-time movie star, and even I admired her beauty.
“I’m sorry.” James bows his head and weeps silently a moment. His chest bucks hard and violent. “I’m so damn sorry.” He wipes his face clean. “I’m going to get a paternity test.” He glances to the door behind me.
“You think you’re Ota’s father, too? Is this some kind of God complex? Some mid-life crisis you’re dealing with?” My husband’s mid-life crisis has driven us all into a fiery abyss.
“No. I just thought maybe that was her, Monica’s daughter. I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about anymore. I just need answers. Monica’s off her rocker. She’s obsessed with me.”
Heather blinks through my mind, that inv
isible daughter of hers. “I have to tell you something.” My voice shakes as I pull him farther down the hall. “You know that girl in the pictures McCafferty shared with us?”
“The nut case who named both of her kids after you? The one that started the GoFundMe?”
“I saw her. She tried to introduce me to her daughter and—” that scene from the hotel room comes to mind and a choking fear clings to me.
He grips my shoulders and gives a light shake. “And what?”
“She acted as if she were right there with us. She was—invisible.” Even sharing the notion with James seems ludicrous. “She simply wasn’t there.”
“Shit.” He looks just as stunned as I was. “McCafferty said she existed. There were school records.”
“But where is she now?”
We both glance to Reagan’s room as if the answer waited inside.
“I don’t know,” I whisper. “I’m not saying that’s her. I’m just saying Heather is out of her mind and she doesn’t know where her child or her sanity is.”
“Who is that little girl?” James wraps his arm around my shoulders and we continue to stare down Reagan’s door as if it had the answers.
“Who is she indeed?”
* * *
James and I decide that I should sleep on a blow-up mattress in Reagan’s room with one eye open. It’s the same blow-up mattress she used back home for sleepovers with friends. James jammed both the front door and the back to ensure that if Ota tried she couldn’t easily get out of the house. He wedged roofing nails into the downstairs windows to make them nearly impossible to pry open. If the house combusted into flames, we would all be toast quite literally.
But Ota didn’t sleep. Ota didn’t even come to bed. Instead, she took me up on the offer and colored all night long. The desk lamp bled right through my onionskin lids, assuring I wouldn’t sleep a single wink myself. It didn’t matter. The last good night’s rest I had was the night before Reagan was taken.
In the morning, after sharing a cup of coffee on the base of the stairs, James thinks it’s best if we keep Ota to ourselves another day and I happen to agree.
“Social services would scoop her right up. We’d lose the upper hand. She hardly trusts us. God only knows how long she’d stay clammed up if she was with strangers.” I raise my mug to him as the toilet flushes in the bathroom behind us, and we watch as Ota walks silently back into Reagan’s room, straight to the coloring projects that have possessed her. I glance to James. “She’s gone through half the ream.”
“I’ll bring up a few blocks of paper from the office.” James and I once bought a huge box of printer paper from Costco and spent the next year wondering how we would ever use it all. I think we have our answer.
He peers in at her from over my shoulder. That stubble of his has grown out. I love him like this, with his hair unkempt, his wrinkled shirt, barefoot with sweats. I wish he was still mine. “Have you looked at any of it?”
“No. She’s hoarding it all in the corner. I figure she’ll have to crash soon, and I’ll get to sift through it all I want. We need her to speak, though.”
“Maybe we should call Rich?” James looks resigned to the fact. I start to protest and he holds a hand up. I know that Rich is more of a brother to him than he is some errant cop working the case, but still. He has laws to uphold. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t say a word.”
“You can’t promise.”
“I will.” He picks up my hand and gives it a squeeze. That small gesture makes me ache to have him again. And then Hailey pops through my mind with that bowling ball uterus of hers and the feeling leaves as quick as it came.
My phone rings from my pocket and it startles me for a second. Jane can’t call me and my mother refuses. I pull it out, half-anxious to see Heather’s name even though she prefers to text. But it’s not Heather. It’s a number I don’t recognize altogether, so I decide to pick up.
“Hello?” The world wobbles beneath me, because at this point anything is possible.
The line clots up with silence.
“Hello?” My voice shrills into the line. “Reagan, is that you?”
The clearing of a throat. “Is this a Mrs. Allison Greer?”
“Greer?” I glance to James who is suddenly eager for information. “Yes—yes it is.”
“My name is Nora Stewart. I run the Saginaw Library District as the head librarian. A woman by the name of Heather Evans came by yesterday. She says you have a child fathered by a Black Stone Indian.”
“Fuck.” I take in a ragged breath and jump to my feet. Leave it to stupid, stupid Heather Evans to blow the most precious details of my life right out of the water.
“Well, I have the information she was looking for. I’m not sure how well you know her, but she said that she was in some kind of trouble. I hope you don’t mind me calling. She left two numbers, and one of them was yours. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t reach her.”
Stupid, stupid Heather.
“Oh?” I’m only mildly concerned at the thought of Heather in trouble. It’s most likely a lie she concocted to cover up for being there to begin with.
“Anyhow.” She pauses and I try to picture this woman, elderly by the sound of her rickety voice, Indian, a Black Stone according to Heather. I imagine her dressed in a purple sweater that she hand-knitted. Comfortable shoes. “We had an appointment at ten and it’s almost noon. She said this was an alternate number to reach her at. She explained to me you were her best friend.”
“Of course, she did.” I scratch the hell out of the back of my head because for the life of me I can’t ever seem to escape that title.
“Well, I’m a bit worried for her. She seemed awfully paranoid while she was here. She kept saying something about being followed. Something about a little girl threatening her.”
“A little girl?” A nervous laugh burps from me as I glance to Ota. “That would be her paranoia.”
“Not necessarily. Not if you knew anything about the Black Stone tribe.”
A fire line of electrical jolts runs up my back, spreading over me, embedding their vampire-like teeth right into my flesh, my nerve endings.
“Ms. Stewart?” I cup my hand over the receiver, walking deeper still into the hall. “Whatever you know about the Black Stone tribe, you need to tell me right now.” I swallow hard, tempering my breathing in the event I miss a single detail.
“Oh, I couldn’t do that over the phone. You know where to find me. But if I were you, I’d check on your friend. Something seemed very, very off to me. I have to go.” The line goes dead.
Something seemed very, very off to her? It sounds like Heather was having an ordinary day.
I step into Reagan’s room to find James seated at the table, the two of them coloring away like father and daughter.
And according to James, that’s exactly what they might be.
12
James
There are some people who come into your life that no matter how brief the interaction you will never forget. Ota, our little mystery girl, is panning out to be one of them, although not in any positive way. I spend the afternoon studying her. Sitting right next to her on one of Reagan’s pastel chunky wooden chairs and pretend to color alongside her. There is a beauty about being near a child, something all around rejuvenating about the experience. Her thick dark hair hauntingly reminds me of my own, but those eyes of hers, those deep wells—they don’t belong to me. I don’t want there to be a child with Monica—especially not this one. I study the ridge of her nose, the outline of her features for a trace of anyone in my family and come up empty each and every time. She looks like no one I had seen before, and yet like every other child. But Ota had too many dimensions, too much depth, to be your ordinary child. She was multilayered, and each of those layers exhibited some dark twisted root system that ensured a mindfuck at every turn.
Why is she here? I can’t seem to wrap my head around the fact that someone sent her to the door last night. I
don’t buy it for a minute that she wandered here herself. But why? They could have asked for a ransom without sending the little girl. Why put her in jeopardy? They can only assume that Allison and I are good people. How can they trust what happens behind closed doors? But, then again, these are not sane people we’re dealing with. They’re already on the hook for felony kidnapping. By logical deduction, Ota must belong to them, whoever they are, since nobody came forward to claim her as missing.
“Can I see the pictures?” I flick a finger at the stack she’s amassing and she slides them over without looking up. I thumb through them quickly, mostly dogs, rabid looking dogs, a forest of evergreens—but tucked in just about every single one of them is an eye—an errant floating eye. Sometimes the eye has wings. Sometimes the eye has a tail. Rarely is it ever unadorned, but it is almost always floating.
Allison comes back in with a stack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches piled high on a tray and a glass of frothy chocolate milk.
Ota lights up at the sight, pushing aside her work to make room for the carbohydrate-laden feast.
“It is delicious,” Allison trills, taking a seat across from her. She sets the chocolate milk on the bookshelf just out of reach, a move both Ota and I find disconcerting. “I know you must be very, very hungry.” She turns around and sets the plate on the nightstand behind her. “And you can eat as many as you like once you answer a few questions for us.”
The little girl takes a quick breath as if protesting the idea. Her forehead wrinkles in elongated waves—but those eyes, those brows of hers have zeroed all of their disdain in on Allison.
“Let’s start with the basics. What is your real name?” Allison doesn’t waste any time.
The girl straightens. “Otaktay.”
She speaks!
Allison and I glance at one another, the equivalent of a mental high five.
My phone buzzes in my pocket and I fish it out, only to find it’s from Hannigan, aka Hailey.
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