In Close

by Brenda Novak

  “What you asked me yesterday about…about being out of school on the day Mom went missing.”

  Claire stiffened. Thanks to what Tug had told her, she didn’t want to discuss this. She was surprised Leanne had even brought it up. “Yes?”

  “I know you’ve been told.”

  Their stepfather must’ve felt too guilty to keep his indiscretion to himself. Claire kneaded her forehead so she wouldn’t have to look at her sister. “Is it true?”

  “I had a crush on Joe, thought I was in love with him.”

  “That’s a yes.”

  Silence.

  Claire had to look at Leanne now. “He was married. And two and a half times your age. What were you thinking?”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I was thirteen, okay?”

  “But…how did you even get hold of a video camera?”

  “I borrowed Mom’s. Dad had just given it to her for Christmas, remember, and I was using it for a school project at the time. I’m embarrassed, and I have been for years, but…there’s more to what happened than my stupid mistake. That’s the part you need to hear if you want to find Mom.”

  A chill ran up Claire’s spine. “Tell me.”

  “Mom was having an affair with Joe.”

  Claire curved her fingernails into her palms. “No.”

  “Yes!”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “That’s why she freaked out. She considered him her man, her guilty pleasure, and was afraid he’d been messing around with both of us. So the confrontation at his place involved as much accusation as anything else. That’s why he showed her the tape. So he could blame it all on me.”

  Claire grappled to understand how such a situation might have played out. “She thought he acted on your…overtures?”

  “Worse. He exposed himself to me first.”

  Remembering how charitable she’d been feeling toward Joe at the bar, Claire stepped back. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “No. We’d been flirting for weeks. A thirteen-year-old girl doesn’t do something that bold out of the blue, without some expectation that it’ll be welcomed.”

  That made sense, but… “Mom wouldn’t believe it?”

  “Of course not. Not after that tape.”

  Claire shook her head. “I can’t believe what you’re saying, either.”

  Leanne’s jaw dropped. “What part of it?”

  “All of it. That he came on to you. That you and he had a relationship. That Mom was jealous instead of hurt and sickened by what you’d done.”

  “You don’t trust me? Just because I didn’t want to tell you I masturbated on video for a man I thought I loved?”

  Squeezing her eyes shut, Claire pressed cold hands to her hot face. “I’m saying you’ve been keeping secrets about that day for a long time. How do I know even this is the full truth?”

  “Because I don’t have anything to hide anymore! I’ve told you the worst of it!”

  But she wasn’t as embarrassed as she should’ve been. She was almost…defiant or…or proud in some perverse way. As if she thought it was some kind of feather in her cap that she could interest a married man at such a young age—or compete with her own mother. “You’re reacting to the rumors, that’s all. Maybe you’re projecting. It’s easy to tell yourself you have no reason to feel bad for what you’ve done when someone else has misbehaved, too.”

  At that, Leanne started to laugh. “I saw the way they were together that day, the way his eyes followed her around the room, the way he tried to touch her. It wasn’t how you’d expect an acquaintance to behave.”

  “She was probably heartbroken to think her young daughter would make a pornographic video, and he was trying to comfort her.”

  Leanne threw up her hands. “This is a waste of time. You see Mom through rose-colored glasses and no amount of reality will change your mind.”

  “Where is the video?” Maybe there was something on that, something Leanne had said or done to preface her actions that would clarify the situation. It wasn’t what Claire wanted to view and yet she couldn’t judge what Leanne was thinking back then without seeing at least the beginning.

  “Mom destroyed it. She ripped out the tape, then set fire to it in our fireplace.”

  Claire was down to twenty minutes before her first haircut showed up, but she couldn’t pull herself away. “Why are you telling me now?”

  “Because you need to understand that Mom left. Remember when they searched the house and discovered a suitcase was missing? Where do you suppose it went?”

  Who could say? Claire had always feared it’d been used to dispose of her mother’s body. Alana hadn’t taken a damn thing. She hadn’t even packed. None of her clothes were missing, none of her toiletries. And her car had been sitting in the drive, the engine cold. “If she’d been carrying a suitcase, someone would’ve noticed her walking down the street. A woman toting luggage isn’t a sight you see every day, especially in a community as small as this one.”

  “She could’ve had a friend pick her up at the house.”

  “What friend, Leanne? If she was having an affair with Joe, why would she leave with someone else?”

  “Because he wouldn’t sacrifice his marriage for their love—or whatever it was. Mom was as upset about that as she was about the video.”

  The person Leanne described wasn’t the person Claire had known as her mother. “So how would she have met this other…friend?”

  “Maybe it was an old boyfriend, a high school sweetheart from California.”

  Where she was born and raised until her parents moved to Pineview her senior year to enjoy their retirement. “And how would they have kept in touch, become close enough to decide they’d run away together?”

  “By email. How else?”

  Claire shook her head. “No, not by email. The police checked our computer. Mom had written to some old friends, but there was nothing questionable in that correspondence.”

  “Our sheriff’s department isn’t the most sophisticated in the world, in case you haven’t noticed. And that was fourteen years ago, before forensic science was as advanced as it is today. Who knows what they might’ve missed?”

  “Still, she would’ve mentioned someone, and she didn’t.”

  “We were kids! Do you think she’d tell us?”

  Was that what she thought? Human beings were complex, often reacting differently depending on circumstances. And Claire was only sixteen at the time, caught up in all the typical teenage drama. Was it feasible that her mother had been far less happy than she’d assumed? Had Alana grown disenchanted with her marriage and begun to cast around for something more fulfilling? Did she get involved with Joe Kenyon and then realize, when everything came to a head because of Leanne’s shocking video, that she had no hope for happiness there, either? Had she kept in touch with someone from her past and thrown away everything she’d established in Montana to return to California?

  Claire knew Alana had missed her home state. She’d liked to visit there, especially after her parents, tired of the cold winters, moved back, but…

  “Dad would’ve known if there was someone else,” she said. “And he would’ve told the police. He never accused her. It was other people, with no proof. Some of them didn’t even know her well.”

  “Maybe he didn’t reveal everything he could because he didn’t want to hurt us by tarnishing her memory.”

  The way Leanne was doing now. “That would hardly help bring her back.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want her to be found. Maybe he was relieved she left.”

  That statement hit Claire like a splash of cold water in the face. She’d considered the possibility that her stepfather might not have been as upset as he’d seemed. She couldn’t question whether he might be culpable of Alana’s murder and not examine the likelihood of insincerity. But even if he wasn’t the person who’d harmed Alana, had he been glad to have her gone?

  Tug had acted distraught, but Roni moved in wi
th them less than six months later. And by then he and Roni were so far along in their relationship Claire sometimes wondered if they might’ve been involved before—not that she’d ever let herself fully embrace that suspicion.

  “With Mom gone, he didn’t have to worry about losing us,” Leanne said.

  “So now you’re blaming Dad? Are you suggesting he killed her?”

  “Of course not!”

  “But why would he want us? We aren’t even his children.”

  It was Leanne’s turn to be shocked. “You know how much he loves us. He’s always loved us. We were part of the reason he wanted to marry Mom. He tells that to everyone. And it wasn’t as if he had any competition from our real dad, who didn’t even put up a fight when he adopted us.”

  Was it all about love? Or was it more about making do because he couldn’t have children of his own? Claire wasn’t positive he was infertile. He’d never spoken of it. But he’d never fathered a child, either, even with his first wife. And Claire was pretty sure her mother had once mentioned, on the phone with Grandma Pierce, that she thought he was sterile. Claire had walked in on the middle of the conversation and been curious about it, but her mother had changed the subject and shushed her when she tried to confirm what she’d heard.

  “Mom was gone, so not only could he keep us, he was free to be with whoever he wanted without a nasty divorce,” Leanne said. “And he’d inherit everything Mom had just received from Grandma and Grandpa Pierce. It was the perfect setup for a man who loved us but no longer loved her.”

  Leanne had never approached the subject from this angle before. Claire had no idea why she was doing it now. Was it revenge for what Tug had finally revealed about that tape? “We can’t know how Dad feels. Only he knows that. But we can look at the facts. A suitcase was missing but nothing else. Where would Mom go with an empty suitcase?”

  “She could’ve filled it with brand-new clothes for her brand-new life.”

  “She didn’t use her debit card, or any credit cards, after she went missing.”

  “Of course not. They’d be too easy to trace. But she might’ve had cash. She and her sister had just split four and a half million dollars. Who knows how much she hid away?”

  The money had changed a lot of things in their lives—or promised to. They didn’t have it for very long before Alana went missing. For nearly twenty years, Tug had worked at Walt Goodman’s gun store and Alana had clerked part-time at the Stop ’n’ Shop. She sold some of her artwork, which helped, too, but not for much money. She hadn’t yet fulfilled her dream of making her mark on the art world. They’d lived hand to mouth—until Grandma and Grandpa Pierce died.

  Maybe some of what Leanne said was plausible, but Claire couldn’t accept that Alana had left them. She couldn’t accept that Alana had left her only sister, either. Claire would never forget standing at the grave of her cousin, Aunt Jodi’s son, who’d drowned while surfing off the coast of Maui. She’d repeatedly scanned the cemetery for anyone who might look like her mother. That was the day she’d known without a doubt that Alana hadn’t left voluntarily. She wouldn’t have missed Chris’s funeral.

  “What do you have to hide, Lee?” Claire whispered. “There’s more than you’re saying, despite everything you’ve told me about that pornographic video. I can’t figure out what it is, but…it’s not that Mom was having an affair with the married man you were trying to tempt. There’s something else.”

  The blood drained from her sister’s face. “You’re crazy. I’m not hiding anything. I just don’t want you to accuse someone and realize later that you were wrong.”

  “Why? Because you think I might accuse you? Is that where you’re afraid my search will lead me?”

  “No!” she cried, but she’d already turned to the door. “I was thirteen, Claire. I don’t know how you can even ask me that.”

  Neither did Claire. But she’d never guessed her younger sister would set her sights on a married man while she was still in junior high. Or be aggressive enough to make a sex tape for him. Or entertain all the eligible men in town now that she was an adult. Was the one person she believed she knew best actually someone she didn’t know at all?

  “Did you hurt her, Lee?” she called.

  Did she even want an answer? What if Leanne said yes? Wasn’t a life spent in a wheelchair punishment enough for anything? If it was Leanne who’d hurt Alana, she must’ve acted in anger, and Tug must’ve helped hide the evidence. Claire couldn’t imagine any other interpretation. Leanne wouldn’t, couldn’t, harm those who were closest to her in a calculated way. She wasn’t like the psychopaths Claire had studied in her quest for answers, wasn’t so narcissistic as to be completely indifferent to the pain of others.

  Or was she? She was certainly smart enough to mimic true emotion. Was there a killer behind the mask of her pretty face?

  The very idea made Claire shudder. No. That would mean she’d faked other things, as well—such as the love she professed to feel for Tug, Roni, even Claire.

  Leanne stopped when she reached the porch. “Quit being ridiculous,” she said, and it was a comfort to hear her state it so emphatically. “I should’ve known you wouldn’t be able to see the truth. It doesn’t matter how much time goes by, you’re as stubbornly ignorant as ever.”

  Stubbornly ignorant, or doggedly determined to reveal facts Leanne desperately wanted to keep hidden? “I’m going to find out, Lee,” Claire said softly. “Whatever it is, I’m going to find out.”

  The slam of the screen door was her only answer.

  Demo version limitation

  12

  The call came in just after dark.

  Jeremy stood at the bottom of the stairs, listening to his father talk. He eavesdropped a lot; sometimes it was his only way of knowing what was going to happen before it did.

  He didn’t care much about this conversation, though. It was just about someone showing up unexpectedly, some private investigator. But no private investigator had shown up here, and that was what mattered.

  Yawning, he nearly walked back into his room to listen to his music. When the iPod he’d saved up for was playing in his ears, his father ceased to exist. But before he could turn away, he heard anger in his father’s voice—and the name Les. Then he froze. He knew who Les was. His father had found Les through a cousin who lived in Wyoming. Cousin Blake got himself in trouble a lot. He’d even been in prison—twice. He’d said Les was a person who could “take care of anything.” Jeremy had heard his father use those exact words when he arranged for Les to “take care” of David. And then David died and everyone started calling it an accident. That was how good Les was. His father even said he was good, said it out loud as if he’d included Jeremy in his plans from the beginning. His father was like that sometimes.

  Claire’s name came up next. He’d been right to be so worried these past few days. She was getting herself in trouble, just like he’d feared when he followed her to the cabin. If Les was coming back to Pineview, that was bad. His father had once said to Les, “How many people have you…helped the way you’re helping me?” And the answer must’ve been big because his father had whistled.

  Jeremy wanted to warn her, but he couldn’t. She’d ask how he knew, and that was something he couldn’t ever reveal.

  His father slammed down the phone. The floor creaked, keys jingled, the garage door opened and the Jeep engine roared to life.

  Where was his father going? Not to hurt Claire…

  Wringing his hands, Jeremy paced in the laundry area for several minutes while images—terrible images—crowded his head. His father wouldn’t act right away, would he? Someone might see or tell. He’d wait for Les, and Les lived someplace called Idaho that sounded far away.

  Again, Jeremy wanted to go to Claire. Instead, he grabbed his flashlight and hurried to the crawl space under the stairs. He hadn’t been in there for years, not since he’d attached six padlocks to be sure nothing could get in or out. The dank smell and spiderwebs alon
e were enough to keep him from wanting to return. But maybe it was time to check on the situation under there. He’d known he would probably need to make changes at some point. That was what kept him up so often at night.

  He never forgot a number, so he had no problem with the combinations for the locks. But the five-foot space was far too short for him, and it grew more cramped as he neared the outer edges. Where the dirt had been thrown up against the foundation, he had to crawl.

  The scent of the moist earth filled his nostrils. He imagined another smell, one that made him gag, but he kept going and before long, he sat on his haunches, aiming his flashlight at the dusty suitcase he’d hidden there fifteen years earlier. It was worn on one side, completely scraped from when he’d had to drag it up the driveway. It’d been a cheap case to begin with, one without wheels, which had made his job harder. He could really have used some wheels…?.

  His heart slammed against his rib cage—ba-bump…ba-bump—which happened whenever he thought of the crawl space because then he remembered the night it all happened. How weak he’d felt when he brought that suitcase here. How badly he’d been shaking and sweating. He’d vomited after he got to his room. The contents of the suitcase—he couldn’t bear to think of what was inside in any other way—had been so much heavier than he’d expected. Then there was the disgusting liquid that’d begun to leak out. He’d thought the trail it left behind would lead anyone who chose to look right to him.

  But the storm had washed it away. Big fat raindrops had started to fall just when he was certain he’d be caught. The wind had even concealed his grunts and labored breathing. It was almost as if he’d been invisible—not that anyone would be able to overhear him, anyway. He and his father lived in the woods.

  Absently, Jeremy rubbed his stomach, which was cramping as if this night was that night, and studied what was left of the case. If he had to move it, he supposed it wouldn’t be heavy anymore. Things changed with time. He’d seen proof on TV.

  It’d been a decade and a half—he heard that often, whenever anyone spoke of Alana. What would he find if he unzipped the lid?