Her Perfect Life

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  Almost without thinking, she used one finger to move the hair off his forehead, his skin still warm to the touch. Alive. Go, Cassie, she commanded herself.

  She felt the tears begin, felt their dampness on her face, and she wiped them away with the back of her hand, furious, and terrified. She wanted her mother, she wanted her father, she wanted someone, anyone, to come help her and fix this and take care of her and tell her what to do. She pressed her palms to her face, trying to hold it all in and make it go away and when she opened her eyes, Jem would be laughing at her. And she’d be so mad. Then she’d storm out of here and never see this idiot again.

  She stared at him, ignoring her own tears now, willing him to be joking with her, some stupid insane boy joke, and she’d laugh, she promised she would. But Jem’s face, serene and still, and blood on his cheek, seemed to taunt her.

  There could be no more wishful thinking. She had to do something.

  She took a deep shuddering breath.

  Okay. She knew what to do. First, stop being hysterical. Then, call 911. She reached for the receiver of the black phone on the end table, the one that Jem had probably used to call his friend. She stopped, hand in midair, halfway to the phone.

  Jem had called his friend. Who was on his way here. She felt her heart racing, constricting, making it difficult to breathe. Whoever showed up here—Jem’s friend or the ambulance people, or whoever—would find her here in this apartment.

  What if he even died?

  They’d question her. They’d blame her. It would be horrible, it would be—had she killed him by giving him the water? Or by hitting him with the cabinet? It was a mistake! How was she supposed to know what to do? She hadn’t killed him, of course she hadn’t, but what would she say? She imagined it, how she’d tell what had happened. She envisioned it all, the pictures racing through her mind like a terrible dumb movie where the woman was guilty and everyone knew it, and she got tripped up and trapped by her own pitiful answers.

  The truth would sound like a lie. They’d never believe her.

  It would first be all in the papers; that she had been here, a freshman, and they’d try to interview her, and how she’d been the one who’d kept Professor Shaw in the building and it had led to him almost dying, and now she was here—here—in the apartment of the other person who’d been hurt in the Wharton fire and that was so, so—impossible that they’d never believe it was a coincidence.

  And he was a drug dealer. And she had seen the drugs. Knew they were there. Might have even touched one of the bags. And too late now.

  Should she get rid of them? Toss them out the window into the woods?

  She cried out, a soft whimper of terror, covering her mouth with both hands to stop herself from sobbing with fear. She was in trouble.

  She stared out into the dark maw of the Berwick Forest, thinking about whether she could disappear into the dark, like the entire vast forest of trees in front of her, disappear in the night and never have to ever—wait. She didn’t have to do that. She didn’t have to hide drugs, or dump them. She didn’t have to disappear, or do anything except have her regular life. Because no one knew she’d been in this apartment.

  Cassie bent down and picked up the glasses from the floor, replaced them on the table. One water glass. One wineglass. One person on the floor.

  She used the tail of her flannel shirt to wipe off the stem of the wineglass, and put it back on the Newsweek. The paper towel she’d used to wrap the water glass was still on the coffee table. She’d only touched that glass directly when she filled it—and the towel would smudge her fingerprints. She hoped it worked that way. Even if they found someone’s fingerprints, she didn’t think they could tell when they were from. Plus hers weren’t on file anywhere. She couldn’t believe she was thinking like this. But she was.

  She could use her shirt when she touched the doorknob. And the elevator buttons. Or she could run down the back steps, there must be some. Make sure no one saw her leave.

  Her heart lifted with possibility. With freedom. No one would know.

  Unless Jem had told his friend she was here.

  NOW

  CHAPTER 32

  LILY

  “Tell me about your sister Cassie,” Banning said as he accelerated onto the open highway. “Why do you think Greer was researching her? Do you know anything about what happened to her? Where she is?”

  “I … Why are you asking about Cassie?” Lily paused, calculating. Banning had steered into the fast lane with scarcely a look into his mirrors, and the speedometer was now topping seventy. She wasn’t afraid of him, not exactly. If Cassie was in trouble, Lily needed to understand whose side Banning was on. And where the maybe-not-missing Greer fit into it. Lily didn’t know anything about Cassie. Question was, what did Banning know?

  “Lily? Skip the phony bafflement.” Banning had turned to her, slicing the space between them with a forget-about-it gesture before he looked at the traffic again. “You know as well as I do. Those four words on the list only go together to mean one thing, and that’s your sister, Cassie Atwood. Everyone in law enforcement knows her. The great cop failure. The beautiful missing college girl. Missing, or hiding, or … wherever she is.”

  “But that was a long time ago. She might be dead.”

  “Maybe.” Banning nodded. “But let’s come back to that. Cassie went to Berwick, spent most of a semester there, and then she was gone. Marianne was next on the list. Cassie’s roommate was Marianne Dawe. Now deceased. Kirkhalter is Walter Kirkhalter, the cop who headed the investigation.”

  “Who is also dead.” Lily heard the bitterness in her own voice. The dismissive Detective Kirkhalter, who’d given the impression from the start he thought Cassie would turn up someday. That she was pulling some con, or prank, or cover-up. A couple of years ago, Lily’d gone to interview him, reminding him she’d been just a little girl the last time they’d met, even reminded him of the paper dolls. And of what she’d tried to tell him back then. What he’d dismissed as fantasy.

  But she knew, knew when she was seven and now that she was so much older, what had really happened. She remembered the thick night, remembered it as if it were yesterday, and the glow of her penguin night-light, the one Cassie herself had outgrown.

  Cassie hadn’t awakened her, just stood over her little twin bed in the darkness. Somehow Lily had felt her presence, opened her eyes, and squinted into the gloom.

  “Cassie!” she’d whispered. And felt her eyes widen.

  “Shhhh.” Cassie was holding her Penny, the stuffed penguin she’d left perched on the ruffled pillow shams of her bed when she went off to college. “Whisper. Promise me you won’t tell.”

  “I promise,” Lily said, and whispered, too, because she wanted to make Cassie happy.

  “I’ve done a bad thing, Lillow,” Cassie had said softly. “And I have to go.”

  Lily had tried to understand. She knew what “bad thing” meant, and she’d done bad things, too—sneaked extra cookies, or lied about brushing her teeth. She’d struggled to see her sister in the dark. “What bad thing? Just say you’re sorry, and it will all go away.”

  Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and she saw her sister wipe a finger under one eye. “I am sorry, Lillow, I am. But this one time, saying sorry is not enough, and I have to go. I just wanted to say—”

  “Mom’s not gonna let you,” Lily had argued. “You have college.”

  “You have to not tell Mom, not tell her anything, hear me, Lillow? You’re my Lillow, and you’re my best friend, and I am counting on you to act like a big girl. You are a big girl. And you have to promise promise promise.”

  “Is this a dream?” Lily remembered even now, wondering that.

  “Maybe,” Cassie said. “If that’s easier. But you take Penny, and every time you see her, she’ll remind you of your promise. And remind you of me. I’ll always try to watch out for you, best I can. I’ll try to know where you are. But I’ve done a bad thing, a very bad thing. Still
, my Lillow, you remember me, and that I love you.”

  Lily had reached out for the fuzzy penguin and hugged it to her, closing her eyes as she did.

  And when she opened them, Cassie was gone.

  Then Lily had done a bad thing, too. She’d broken her promise. And told the police. She missed Cassie so much, and if Cassie apologized, no one could be mad at her anymore. That’s how it worked. And she held out Penny, showed him, to prove Cassie had really been there.

  But the tall police officer in the black parka had told her it was a dream. He’d told her not to repeat dreams. And that she was never to speak of it again.

  All those years later, Kirkhalter, aging and vague in his living room recliner, had seemed to need to scour his memory for even a vestige of the case.

  When she’d traveled to Berwick to see him, she’d expected he’d look different, everyone did after twenty-five years. But sixty-something Kirkhalter seemed to have allowed gravity and power to claim him. In their so-called interview, Lily saw spidery veins in his thickened nose, the planes of his face pudged out, his skin loose and dappled.

  And he’d refused to own up to his failure. Since he’d retired, he’d told her without a seeming trace of regret, his files were long gone.

  “Did you at least regret that the search didn’t continue?” Lily had tried to ask it gently.

  He’d stared her down. “You’d be happier if we’d found your sister’s body, miss?”

  Lily had gasped at the harsh and heartless question.

  “So you gave up?” Lily’d retaliated, snapped at him, had to, couldn’t help it.

  “And we’re done here, miss.” Kirkhalter had yanked a lever to tip his recliner chair back to upright. Cocked his chin toward his front door. “You can show yourself out.”

  She’d cried for hours afterward.

  When Lily’d read Kirkhalter had died in a car accident, she was authentically sad. With him gone, more of Cassie’s history was gone, and Lily’s, too. Soon there would be no one who knew anything firsthand. No files, no investigations, no evidence, no direct knowledge. Just the memory of a girl who once existed, captured in a photo with her dog.

  “Kirkhalter died in a car accident, yeah,” Banning said, interrupting her thoughts. “The final word, grandmother. Cassie’s grandmother—your grandmother.”

  Lily spooled out a breath, wondering, for the millionth time, if Cassie had sworn Gramma to secrecy, too. “She’s dead now, too.”

  “I know.”

  “You do? How?” Lily pushed him, harder than it probably warranted, annoyed with herself for having this too-personal conversation, annoyed with herself for being so open with him while trying to get some leverage. “Did you get my grandmother’s obituary from your research guys?”

  “Cassie’s grandmother. Yup.”

  Banning’s answer hung in the air. In the silence, Lily heard the low rumble of the air conditioner, and the grumbling sound as the tires traveled over imperfections in the pavement. This was the part of the Mass Pike where Boston couldn’t decide whether to be beautiful or tough, industrial or commercial; out one window, an abandoned train yard, out the other, a scaffolded soon-to-be-chic hotel development.

  Lily felt equally torn as the multicolored landscape blurred by. Here she was, literally carried along on someone else’s mission. Someone who had tried to convince her—by lying—that their mission was shared. He might be on the hunt for Greer, but she believed Smith. Banning’s goal was Cassie.

  “And that’s enough answers from me.” Lily adjusted the tote bag in her lap. Her phone felt warm, she’d been clutching it so long. “I took your little ‘list quiz,’ although obviously, you already knew what the words meant. Now it’s your turn. I have a list of questions of my own. Like—where are we going? Where is Greer? How do you know about Cassie? And why do you care? You can answer in any order you like.” She crossed her arms over the black canvas bag and shifted position in the black leather seat, challenging him. “Ready? Go.”

  “Hang on.” He glanced at his rearview mirror. “Gotta pass this guy.”

  He accelerated, hard, zooming around a rackety exhaust-spewing landscape truck, and then veered back into the fast lane, swerving so precariously that Lily almost lost her balance, the truck receding behind them like a vanishing rusty splotch.

  “Whoa,” Lily said.

  “Jerk. Some people don’t belong in the fast lane. Anyway. One more thing. You’ve looked for her, right? You must have. On the other hand, you’re hardly tough to locate. She could’ve easily contacted you if she wanted to. Ever consider that maybe she doesn’t want to?”

  “No,” Lily lied.

  Banning stared straight ahead.

  As if he knows I’m lying, Lily thought.

  “Look,” she went on. “I was seven when she—left, disappeared, was kidnapped, whatever she was. She had a calendar, I remember, drawn on her notebook. She’d crossed off the days. My mother and I saw it the last time she was home. It seemed as if, day by day, Cassie was marking time until something. Waiting for something. We never knew what.”

  She pictured that notebook, the X-marks Cassie had made. All Cassie’s belongings had been boxed up after seven years, the day the “presumed dead” ruling came. Mumma had made a ritual of it, calling Lily home from college to see the packing and taping and the final discarding. Lily was still heartbroken by the memory of her grieving mother, thinner than ever and brittle around the edges, eyes permanently red-rimmed and bereft. Mumma always seemed to blame herself, which was still a puzzle. And then she died, too. Lily had kept only the one scallop-edged photo, the one she now pinned to her bulletin board.

  “If she’s alive—” She said the words again, then assessed Banning’s reaction for some flicker of confirmation or denial. His eyes stayed stolidly on the road. “If she’s alive, why hasn’t she contacted me? If she’s dead…”

  A reality came over her, a dawning, a vision of two puzzle pieces fitting together. Lily put one finger to her lips as if to stop herself from talking, making sure she was right. She nodded, agreeing with herself. Took her finger away. “If she’s dead, there’d be no reason for you to be making this big deal about it.”

  She lifted her chin as her mind raced ahead. “You know what happened,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  She stared at him, waited for him to reply. Waited as they passed a highway marker, waited as she watched the flash of a purple-striped commuter train speed by on the roadside tracks.

  “Did you hear my question?” she asked.

  Banning nodded, focused on the road ahead of them, a straight gray strip heading west. “Yup. I heard it.”

  Lily slapped the dashboard with an open palm. “Banning!”

  He flinched, surprised, and looked at her, quizzical.

  “Banning,” she said again. “Where the hell are we going and what the hell are you doing?” She tapped open her phone, brandished it at him. Tapped the number nine. “I’m calling the police. You’re kidnapping me, you know?” She tapped one. “So answer me. All I have to do is hit the one, just one more time. And believe me, I will.”

  A state police car sped by them, navy and silver, blue wigwag lights glaring in the sun, siren at full blast. Other cars slowed, moved over to let it pass. Banning slowed, too. The police car wailed out of sight, the sound diminishing, leaving them with only the hum of the air conditioner and the buzz of tension between them.

  “Well?” She held up the phone at him, her finger poised.

  “I’m a private detective,” he said. “As I’m sure your friend told you on the phone.”

  “Are you even kidding me?” Lily’s eyes widened, then narrowed at him. “You came to my office under false pretenses,” she hissed. “You lied up one side and down the other, basically impersonated a police officer—” Lily stopped herself, recognizing her vulnerability, and knowing Banning, or whoever he was, had the physical upper hand with her. Especially now that she’d made him confess his deception. She put
up both palms, pretending to calm herself. “Look, Banning. Is it really Banning?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But hey. I need to know where Greer is. That she’s not in trouble. And why she’s gone.”

  “She’s fine.” Banning steered to the right, moving across one middle lane, then the next. “At least, she was when we met last night at Lido.”

  BEFORE

  CHAPTER 33

  CASSIE

  “Nothing,” Cassie said. She’d hoped Marianne would be out of their dorm room, somewhere, anywhere, like any reasonable college student on a Friday night. But no, when she got back from Jem’s—Jem’s!—her roommate was sitting cross-legged on her ridiculous apple-green comforter, leaning against the pink pillows stacked behind her back against the twin bed’s headboard, reading a thick hardcover textbook.

  The minute Cassie arrived, Marianne had taken a yellow highlighter out of her mouth and asked what she’d been doing. Cassie had hoped “nothing” would be an acceptable answer.

  “Right.” Marianne tapped the highlighter against her lips, her eyes full of mischief. “Nothing inside at a bar? Or nothing in someone’s dorm room?” She wrinkled her nose, sniffing. “You don’t usually smell like wine.”

  “Wine?” Cassie tried to sound baffled. She hadn’t noticed, maybe she was used to it, or too afraid, or too distracted. Now she had to scramble for an answer. “I’ve been at the hospital, if you must know.” Cassie made herself look sad, which wasn’t hard to do, and began to unbutton her flannel shirt. Their door was open a sliver, because the heating system in the dorm was so gross, it was always too hot.

  Cassie moved behind the door, so in case anyone walked by, they couldn’t see her. Three buttons open, and she pulled the shirt over her head. She kept talking as she unzipped her jeans, pulling them off, too, feeling the damp splotches all down one side. You couldn’t see them on the dark denim, but Marianne was right. You could smell the wine. It made her want to throw up, not the wine itself, but the memory of the wine, and everything that went with it, and what might be, must be, going on in that apartment right now. But now she was here, and alcohol was alcohol. And this hospital excuse might work. Plus, it was partly true. People would have seen her there, for better or for worse. Her mind raced ahead, imagining the obstacles to come. Might as well own as much of it as she safely could. “I agree, I stink,” Cassie said. “Hospital smells are the worst.”