Laura sits up straighter and leans forward, the tightness returning to her features.
“But I wasn’t going anywhere, Margaret,” Laura says. “Why would Graye want to hurt me?”
Margaret meets her gaze. “She told me . . . She said she had a plan. You were going to help launch her career as a novelist. But when that didn’t appear to be working out—”
“The book,” Laura says on an exhale of pent-up breath. “She was waiting for me to read the book. But once I had . . .”
Margaret nods. “She felt you’d let her down. Both her aspirations for the future and the friendship she’d invested in you. In Graye’s mind, those things are twisted together into one. By dismissing her writing, you abandoned her too. In your own way.”
Margaret says this with a hint of apology, but it does little to lessen the impact her words have on Laura.
“I don’t know how she thought she’d get away with it. I don’t even know if she’d thought that far ahead. She’s done so for so long, it was hardly a consideration from what I can tell.”
“The nurse?” Laura asks.
“Had been abusing a friend. Graye . . . takes friendship very seriously,” Margaret says, hearing the horror of the words and their implications.
“And Zoe Kendrick? David’s TA?” The tension in Laura’s voice is growing.
Margaret frowns. She opens her mouth to speak, then looks away.
“She confessed to me she tampered with the girl’s car. There was an accident. Miss Kendrick was badly injured.”
“For no other reason than . . .” Laura trails off.
“It appears she was simply in the way,” Margaret says, unable to look Laura in the eye. “Murder had become a viable option for Graye.”
Margaret’s words are succinct, restrained. They give no sign of the struggle she faces not to turn and beg forgiveness for allowing this to happen. She abandoned her daughter to walk this twisted path alone, and this is Margaret’s burden to bear. Neither Laura nor any of Graye’s victims owe Margaret forgiveness.
She suspects not even God will forgive her sins.
51
The jury deliberates for three hours and seventeen minutes before coming back with a verdict in the most sensational trial the country has witnessed in decades.
Graye Templeton, the woman once known as Grace Thacker, America’s sad little sweetheart, is found guilty of all charges.
52
LAURA
The drive is long, made longer by Laura second-guessing herself with every mile that passes.
She wishes, not for the first time, that she’d brought Milo, but it’s a very long way from the Texas Gulf Coast to Beckworth, Missouri.
The puppy will be happier with Dr. Lawson while she’s gone. Laura, too, would rather be home. She can’t put her finger on the moment the word home became Port Mary, which was always her grandmother’s island in her mind, but at some point, New York became a place to visit. Port Mary is a place to make a life. Her place.
Antoine yelling obscenities from the taco stand as Milo barks madly at the birds on the beach is a high point of her days.
The last few months have brought a great deal of change for Laura. “An awakening,” her mother calls it.
She doesn’t know about that. What she does know is being alone for the first time without parents or roommates or a partner has forced her down the path to discovering someone new. Herself.
The good, the bad, and everything in between.
Some of what she’s discovered scares her.
It’s difficult to measure the “Graye Effect,” as she thinks of it, complete with capitalization. It’s touched every part of her. She’ll never again be the woman she was.
In some ways, that’s not a bad thing. In others, she’s still adjusting.
Port Mary has helped. Her family and friends. And Milo, of course, rescued from a shelter and in need of love almost as much as she was.
But there’s one aspect of her new life she’s kept hidden from everyone, fearing judgment and concern.
Her growing obsession with Graye Templeton.
Once Laura connected Graye with the manuscript of the fictional Fiona Boyd, she found herself drawn back to the narrative.
She’d seen the crime scene photos during the trial. The incongruity of a ream of typewritten papers scattered about the room, some with dark splotches of blood soaking through, many having come to rest on top of David’s body, was a bizarre and menacing aspect of an already tragic case.
Graye was correct; the original pages were in police evidence storage in case they were ever needed for an appeal, as Laura discovered when she approached the Rockaway Police Department about the book.
She hadn’t intended to. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to turn her car into the station and walk through those glass doors once more.
She’d been heading to the airport in Houston to catch a plane and spend the week with her parents. Her father was finally retiring, and Lisette was throwing a party.
“If you’re not up for it, Laura, we understand. But of course, we’d love to have you. It might be good for you to step off that island once in a while. Remind yourself the world is a big, wide, wonderful place.”
Her mother was right, of course.
She needed to get away from the walls staring back at her. Daytime was best, with the sun and surf and the beach always waiting. But at night, the house could become an echo chamber, reverberating words of the past until the volume was unbearable.
David’s words. Graye’s.
And lately, when she was least expecting it, Fiona Boyd’s.
She’d been honest with Graye when she told her the voice in the manuscript was compelling. It had a way of burrowing under your skin and settling in.
The problem came when she wanted it out and it refused to go.
Laura had packed for New York, hoping a change in perspective could help her shake free of her ghosts. But when the turn approached for the police station, Laura changed lanes too quickly, cutting off another car and earning herself a honk in the process.
She didn’t think about her reasons, simply let her instincts lead her.
“I’m sorry, Laura,” Detective Branson had said. “We don’t have those pages in our possession anymore. They were transferred with the rest of the evidence when the case was turned over to the federal authorities.”
She’d been expecting that, but her shoulders dropped anyway.
“Okay. Thank you for your time.”
She turned to walk out the door. She had a plane to catch, and no business digging up things best left buried in shallow graves.
“Laura?” the detective called out.
Laura’s hand stalled on the door and she looked back over her shoulder.
“If you’re that interested, I may be able to help,” the woman said.
Laura perked up.
“Our sergeant scanned the pages after the lab was done. Or he was supposed to, at least. I don’t think anyone ever had any use for the file, but I can see if we still have a copy, if you’d like.”
A nervous flutter awakened in Laura’s chest, something that felt disturbingly like excitement.
“Yes,” she said, keeping her voice sober. “That would be much appreciated, Detective.”
“Would you like to wait?”
Laura glanced at the time on her phone. She should be twenty minutes farther down the road if she expected to be at the airport in time to board her flight.
She bit her lip.
“Yes, I’ll wait. If you don’t mind.”
When the plane to New York lined up on the runway, Laura wasn’t on board.
She was riding the ferry back to Port Mary, absorbed in the file she’d opened on her phone. It had taken the detective nearly an hour to track down the scanned pages, while Laura waited nervously, wondering what the hell she was doing.
“Mama, I’m not going to make it,” she said during the phone call to update her fami
ly on her plans. “Next time, though. We’ll spend some time just the three of us, okay?”
Lisette was disappointed, and Laura didn’t miss the worry in her understanding reply. But that worry would bloom into full-scale concern if Lisette had an inkling of the reason she’d canceled the trip.
Once back home, Laura fired up her laptop and printer. Sergeant Graham had indeed scanned the documents, but had made no effort to put them into any sort of order.
She printed each one and laid them out on the floor in her living room with a glass of wine close at hand. Her stomach seized at the sight of the dark spots marring several of the pages.
It’s nothing but light and shadow, she told herself. A representation. Not real blood.
The mantra didn’t help much, but the second glass of wine did.
Laura spent the evening poring over Graye’s words, letting the voice she remembered so clearly take her by the hand and lead her on a journey she now saw with different eyes.
The story centered on a young girl in an orphanage who escapes her drab reality by crafting darkly intriguing fairy tales she burns in an old coffee can, spreading the ashes beneath a gnarled old black cherry tree that grows on the orphanage grounds.
Even if no one listens to her, a child who’s never mattered to a soul, the tree is ancient. Her stories will soak into the soil, become part of the tree, and live forever.
But the tree begins to bear strange fruit, with a rich and addicting flavor. The child feeds the tree more and more stories to sustain the irresistible teardrop-shaped black cherries, but the line between reality and fiction begins to blur when the residents of the orphanage eat the fruit and begin to show signs of becoming the characters from her stories.
Rereading the main narrative, armed with the added knowledge of Graye’s past, Laura could clearly see where Graye drew her inspiration.
The fairy tale sections, especially, stories within the story, resonated with the bleak history both Graye and Margaret tried so hard to escape.
The cinder girl and her golden sister who is separated from her prince and imprisoned to spin gold for their overbearing and narcissistic mother. The sister’s revenge. It’s not a difficult leap to tie the characters in the story to their real-life counterparts.
And yet, Laura mused, after she’d patched the work back together and read it through from beginning to end, her initial reaction still rang true.
Somewhere along the way, the child narrator of the story becomes more than a fantasist with trouble separating her life from her fictional world. She becomes a liar.
And that was the crux of the dissatisfaction that plagued Laura after her first read-through. By the end of the book, the reader is left with a sense that the little girl is utterly untrustworthy, both in the things she tells herself and the things she tells the reader.
It’s something that, as a literary device, often works. But to end the story without acknowledging it or giving the reader at least a glimpse of the truth behind the web of lies is unforgivable.
And that is why Laura is behind the wheel of her car, with her home growing farther away by the minute. She can’t put Graye’s story aside. Lord knows she’s tried. But the voice of the child, of the woman, has burrowed into her mind.
Yet she’s not willing to speak to Graye directly. She’s not sure she ever will be.
But Graye isn’t the only person who knows the truth of her past. The truth Graye can’t bear to reveal even to herself, through a fictional fairy tale, within a fictional story.
The truth Laura is inexplicably drawn to seek out. It waits in Missouri like Pandora’s box, where a murderer holds the key.
53
LAURA
“I told you on the phone, I’ve got nothing to say to you.” Alexis Thacker’s words don’t match the gleam that lights up her eyes when Laura introduces herself.
“I was passing through. Thought since I was nearby, I’d see if I could persuade you,” Laura says.
Alexis snorts. “You expect me to believe that?”
Laura shrugs and gives her a sheepish smile. “Can’t blame a girl for trying.”
“Oh, they’ll blame a girl for all sorts of things around here. You have no idea. Why do you think I’m stuck working in a grease pit out on the highway?”
Laura glances around. The truck stop is clean, decorated in a throwback vintage style. The clientele, while disproportionately male, seem content to mind their business, drink their coffee, and eat their blue-plate specials.
“Nobody else will hire me. An ex-con is bad enough, but with my history, they can’t push me out the door fast enough. Baby sis following in my footsteps made it worse, dragging all the old stories back to the front page,” she says bitterly.
“Alex, order up,” shouts a man in a white apron from the pass-through window that opens into the kitchen. He’s been eyeing the pair of them for the last few minutes.
“Yeah, yeah,” she calls back over her shoulder.
“You get that,” Laura says. “I’ll wait.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
Laura shrugs again. “My time to waste.”
Alexis hands over a plastic-covered menu. “Pick something. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Laura watches her go, studying her mannerisms. She’s in her early thirties, only seven years older than Graye, but she could pass for much more.
Several photographs from Alexis’s youth are regularly used as staples in any news story about the murder of her mother. As a child, her hair was lighter, along with her expression. She was a vivacious girl, according to the documentaries and true-crime novels. As a teen, she had a glamour that made her seem more than her years.
The constant center of attention in any room, pampered as the favored child of Crystal Thacker, a woman with big ambitions, Alexis performed in pageants from the time she was a baby. None of the news coverage ever mentioned a father, and the cost of the competitions must have put a strain on the single mother’s budget.
But Crystal Thacker was determined. Her daughter was going to be a star.
The woman Laura watches now, serving steak and eggs to long-distance truckers, bears hardly any resemblance to the sixteen-year-old girl who committed such a heinous act.
At least, not on the surface. There’s no sign of the heavy makeup or careful hairstyles that Alexis favored when she was younger. Her face is scrubbed and lined, dark circles evident beneath her eyes. Her dark-blonde hair is pulled back into a severe ponytail.
“I’ll take a root beer and a club sandwich,” Laura says when Alexis saunters back to her table.
She raises an eyebrow. “Not gonna do you any good. I’m not talking to you.”
“Okay,” Laura says. “But I’d still like the sandwich.”
“Long way to drive for lunch, lady,” Alexis says with a smirk.
Laura shrugs again. It’s getting to be her thing. “I’ve heard good things.”
Alexis chuckles. “I’ll pass the compliment along to the chef.”
Laura eats her sandwich in silence and watches Alexis work. She tries not to stare. She doesn’t want her to feel like an exhibit in a zoo.
Alexis may have said she wasn’t interested, but Laura catches the way she glances over to her table periodically. Whether she’ll admit it or not, she’s pleased by the attention.
Laura wipes her mouth on a napkin when she’s done and pulls out her wallet to pay the check.
“Giving up?” Alexis asks. “I thought you looked like a woman with more perseverance than that.”
And there it is, what she’s been waiting for.
“If you don’t want to talk to me, there’s nothing I can do about that,” she says lightly. “And it’s a long drive back to Texas.”
She lays down enough cash for the tab, and adds an extra hundred as a tip.
“For your time,” she says. “I hope life treats you better, Miss Thacker.”
Laura gathers her purse and stands to put on her coat. “It
was nice to meet you.”
She’s taking a risk as she walks away from the woman.
Her hand is reaching to push open the door when she hears, “Hey, wait.”
Gotcha.
She wipes the smile from her face before she turns and glances over her shoulder.
“Are you driving back right now?” Alexis asks, standing with her weight on one leg, trying to look as if she doesn’t care, while Laura does the same.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” Laura says. “Doesn’t seem to be much in the way of entertainment around here.”
“You got that right,” Alexis says. She runs her fingers down the edge of the hundred-dollar bill. “Listen, there’s a motel about a mile up the road. If you need to rest up or whatever before you head back.” She eyes Laura’s expensive coat. “Probably not up to your usual standards, but there’s a bar next door.”
Laura pauses, as if she’s thinking it over. “Do they have a pool table?” she asks.
Alexis raises both eyebrows this time. “Aren’t you full of surprises.”
Laura adjusts the strap of her purse on her shoulder. “Do me a favor, okay? I won’t hustle you, and you do the same for me. I think we’re both old enough to know it’s a mistake to judge a book by its cover.”
Alexis places one hand on her hip. “If you say so, lady.”
“I’ll check out your motel, and I’ll be at the bar next door. If you happen to drop by after your shift is through, the beer is on me. Your call.”
Alexis squints her eyes and looks Laura up and down, but Laura knows her decision has already been made. They’re just playing games now.
“I’m on till four, but I might be busy,” Alexis says.
“Up to you,” Laura says, then turns and walks out of the diner, the bell on the door jingling over her head.
She can play games all day long.
The cost of loosening Alexis Thacker’s tongue totals nine dollars, seventy-five cents. The price of three bottles of beer, plus tips.
The Shadow Writer Page 26
