Laura doesn’t ask how the woman’s parole officer would feel about her hanging out in a bar. It isn’t her business, and clearly Alex, as she prefers to be called, is no stranger here.
“What’s your mother like, Laura?” Alex asks, leaning her weight against the pool cue. “No, wait, let me guess.”
She raises a finger to her lips and stares up at the ceiling.
“She gets her hair done twice a month. Subtle highlights, classic cut. Your father rolls his eyes at the credit card bills, but she smiles sweetly and all is forgiven. How am I doing?”
“Pretty accurate,” Laura admits. She doesn’t admit the vague discomfort of listening to Alex talk about her mother.
Alex points the pool cue in Laura’s direction. “They take a vacation twice a year, always someplace she chooses, although she lets him think otherwise. Your private school education was carefully monitored. Maybe she was involved with the board of directors? She throws a mean dinner party, but always has time for fresh-baked cookies.”
Laura nods. There’s a great deal Alex has left out, but she can’t deny the truth of it all.
“Is that something I’m supposed to be ashamed of?” She leans over and lines up the cue ball to bank the seven. She takes the shot, and the ball drops into the pocket.
“Ashamed?” Alex says. “Why should you be? You won the mommy lottery, my friend.”
A shiver runs down Laura’s spine at the word friend. Those six letters, in that precise combination, have become permanently associated with Graye in her mind, and not in a good way. But by design, she’s only had one drink to Alex’s three, so she’s able to keep her features casual.
“My mother was a bitch,” Alex says. She stares at the balls left on the table, but that’s not what she’s seeing. She’s looking into some dark place Laura’s grateful she’s never been.
Laura remains silent, unwilling to break the spell.
Alex picks up her beer and takes another swig, then leans over and lines up a shot. It’s not hers to take, technically, but Laura doesn’t point that out. Alex misses anyway, the cue ball spinning wildly off to one side.
“The lawyers, the judges, the goddamn press, they got it all wrong, you know. I saw that documentary. A load of crap from beginning to end.”
A cheer goes up from the few patrons bellied up to the bar at this early hour. A ball game plays on the television behind the wall of liquor bottles, and Alex glances in that direction.
“Haven’t you ever wanted to tell your side of the story?” Laura asks carefully, not wanting to lose her now that they’ve arrived at the slow-beating heart of why she’s come. “Set the record straight?”
Alex lets out a dry snort.
“Nobody wants to hear my side of the story,” she says. “What planet are you living on? I’m the spoiled little golden child who turned on her doting mother and murdered her in her bed. The bad seed.”
Laura wonders if that’s a confession. Alex pled not guilty at her trial, just as Graye had. But Alex was only sixteen, and facing charges as an adult by the State of Missouri. Her defense attorney tried to pin the blame on Nick, but the evidence, coupled with Grace’s testimony, didn’t support that.
“The only reason anyone wants to hear what I have to say is so they can point out what a liar I am. To spit on me. People love a public stoning, but I’ve done my time. I’m not volunteering for more.”
“I don’t believe you’re a liar,” Laura says. Strangely, it’s true. Alex is a bitter, angry woman, jaded by prison. By life.
But Laura has an ear for voice, and Alex’s is disturbingly and uncomfortably honest, for all her distasteful qualities.
“Ha,” Alex says. “Then you’d be the first. Nobody wanted to hear about the hours she forced me to spend honing the perfect baton twirl. Or the way she controlled every minute, every second of my life. Scheduled, timed, trained like an elephant in a circus.
“There was nothing in that schedule about being a kid. Playing softball or making friends or having a sleepover. It was voice lessons and head shots and auditions and dye jobs. Do you know what flippers are?”
Laura shakes her head.
“They’re fake teeth,” she says. “Partials that fill in the gaps a kid has from losing their own. They’re bullshit, and they’re painful, but nobody is going to hire a kid for a commercial if they have a big snaggletoothed smile.”
She says the last part in a snobbish singsong voice.
“And the funny thing was, this whole time, there’s Grace, hanging around in the shadows. God, I hated her.”
Laura bites the inside of her cheek.
“It’s like Crystal didn’t even notice she was there most of the time. Grace was free to do anything she wanted, as long as she stayed out of sight, but she was too stupid to know it. She was always hanging around, getting underfoot, acting like a kicked dog that just wants to get kicked some more.”
Alex finishes off her beer in one big drink and holds the empty bottle up to Laura, indicating she could use another.
Laura nods and heads to the bar, taking a moment to gather her thoughts. The childhood Alex describes is so different than her own experience. And Graye, nothing more than a lonely footnote in someone else’s story.
With two fresh bottles in her hand, she walks slowly back to Alex.
“You know the funny thing about my baby sister?” Alex asks when Laura hands over the bottle. “All she had to do was keep her mouth shut. That’s it, and we could have gotten away with it. It’s the one thing she was good at, keeping her mouth shut. Mother made sure of that. But what does she do? For the first time in her life, she opens up and spills everything to a bunch of complete strangers.”
Alex shakes her head, held prisoner by an old anger that’s been stoked to life.
“I hated her even more after that. Stupid, stupid little bitch. But she got hers, in the end.” Alex’s lips stretch into a slow, satisfied smile. “Two consecutive life sentences. Does it get any better than that?”
She reaches out to tap her beer bottle against Laura’s, then tips it up to her lips. Laura sips her own, taking the time to compose her features.
“So you don’t have any doubts Graye did it?” Laura asks, and Alex laughs.
“Doubts? Hell no, I’ve got no doubts. Is that why you’re here? Some misguided idea little Gracie is somehow innocent? Are you searching for something in her past that’s going to let her off the hook?”
She stares at Laura incredulously, and Laura shrugs in return. It’s not why she’s come, but she doesn’t need to tell this woman that.
Alex bends at the waist and lets out a deep, loud bray of laughter. By the time it tapers off, there are tears in the corners of her eyes.
“Look at you. Some rich woman on a mission of mercy. For the benefit of the woman who murdered your husband, no less. That’s funny, lady. But then I guess she probably did you a favor, didn’t she? That guy wasn’t exactly winning any husband-of-the-year awards.”
She takes another gulp of her beer, watching Laura closely over the top of the bottle, gauging her reaction.
That reference to David wasn’t a slip of the tongue.
“How do you know that?” Laura asks slowly.
Alex smiles, a tiger teasing its prey.
“You want to know a secret?” Alex asks. She doesn’t wait for Laura’s answer. “I was there. I saw her do it.”
“What?” Laura says in a low whisper.
“If you repeat that to anyone, I’ll deny it to the day I die, and I have parole records to back me up. But I’ll tell you just so you can sleep better at night, knowing the person responsible is paying for the crime.”
Laura’s head is spinning, and Alex is drinking in her reactions like a woman dying of thirst.
“I was on that pretty little island of yours, watching Grace. I followed her from New York, all the way to you.”
“But why?” Laura asks, though she knows the answer to that.
“Because she�
��s the reason they put me away! She and Nick, but Nick did his time. Grace owed me, and I wasn’t about to let her get out of that debt. I was going to make sure little Gracie, who walked away smelling like a rose, paid every last cent.”
Alex grins again. “But it turned out, I didn’t have to do a thing. She hung herself on her own rope, and I was there to see it.”
“But . . . but how?”
She doesn’t need to ask twice. Alex is nearly bursting to share her own brilliance.
“Some of it was luck. A parole officer with a wife, three kids, and a wandering dick is malleable. That was the easy part. Tracking her down was a little more effort, but not much.”
“I thought her foster records were sealed?” Laura says.
“Oh, they were. Gotta protect America’s little heroine. But Mother had a sister she hardly ever talked about, and that was as good a place to start as any. Once I found the sainted sisters of St. Sebastian’s and their Home for Girls, all it took was a look through old newspaper articles listing their good deeds and, lo and behold, there was a shot of little Grace, standing in the back of a crowd of girls. It was grainy and out of focus, but it was her.”
Alex rolls her eyes. “Sealed records. What a joke. I’d only been out for a few weeks when I found her living under her fancy new name in New York, but I couldn’t stay for long. Stalking costs money, and my parole officer was getting nervous, so I came back here and ‘persuaded’ him to use his resources to keep tabs on Grace. Do you have any idea how much information they have access to?”
Alex shook her head and took another drink from her beer.
“When Graye bought a bus ticket to Texas, I was right behind her. Right after I talked the parole officer into shelling out for a rental car. I made it there before she did. Saw her get off the bus, rent a car of her own, and head straight to your cute little house on the beach.”
Laura sits back on her barstool, shaken to her foundation.
“It didn’t take much to get hired as a waitress for your snooty event, and Jesus, it was fun to watch her. I needed to know everything about her life. I needed to know what she loved.”
Laura squints at her, trying to understand. “But why?”
Alex stared back as if she couldn’t imagine anyone could be so dense.
“So I could take it from her,” she said, as if stating the obvious. “I spent 5,568 miserable days in prison, all because of my sister. She owed me the same in return. Whatever she loved, she was going to lose. If she had a career, I would sabotage it. A boyfriend, or even better, a husband? Men don’t need much prompting to cheat. Mostly, they just need the opportunity.”
Alex shakes her head. “But Grace? She was a big, fat zero. No husband. No kids. No house. No car. Not even a cat that could suddenly go missing. All she had was that shitty job as your assistant. How do you ruin someone’s life when they never bothered to get one?”
The woman sitting in front of her turns Laura’s stomach. Even after everything she knows Graye has done, she can’t stop the pity that stirs within her realizing this is what Graye grew up with.
Alex laughs. “You know she looked right at me at one point, and didn’t even recognize me? I told you, she always was too stupid for her own good.”
“Did you actually see her kill David?” Laura asks in a sharp voice, tired of Alex’s self-congratulatory indulgence and ready to get to the point.
“Oh yeah. She was on the beach the night before, getting shit-faced with some of the loser college kids bumming it for the summer. I was there, watching her. When she stumbled back to her house, she left her phone on the sand. Just left it lying there for me to pick up. What would you have done?”
But Alex doesn’t expect her to answer that.
“I knew it might come in handy, so I picked it up with a paper towel. I’ve played this game before, and I had no intention of leaving my fingerprints anywhere.”
The cold-blooded calculation in such an act tells Laura everything she needs to know about the woman sitting in front of her.
“I’d been crashing at a place up the beach with some of the people from the party, but I couldn’t sleep. I was too excited, too curious about what kind of crazytown drama Grace had gotten herself involved in. I’d seen that husband of yours trying to punch the guy you were sleeping with, seen the way Grace followed you around like a dog.”
She glances up at Laura. “I didn’t know what was going on, but it was too entertaining to interrupt. I was up early, before everyone else. It was still dark, and I walked down to your place. Turns out, that was the best decision I ever made. I’m not sure what I expected to see, but it wasn’t Grace walking into your house with a big-ass knife in her hand.”
“But you . . . you actually saw her kill him?”
Alex nods. “I got up close, watched from the window. She was sneaking around for a while, but then what’s-his-name shows up from somewhere.”
“David,” Laura whispers.
“Yeah, David. So they start screaming at each other. She’s acting insane, like she thinks he’s done something. And her screaming—I mean, it was getting on my nerves too, and the guy was obviously nursing a hangover. He grabbed her by the arms, yelling at her to shut the hell up.”
Alex shrugs. “And she fucking stabbed him.”
The apathy and total disregard for life that permeate that statement give Laura chills.
Alex laughs. “And then, it comes out at the trial that guy was actually her dad! I mean, can you believe that shit? Like a bad soap opera or something. And there’s Grace, acting like she didn’t even know.”
She shrugs. “I don’t know, maybe she didn’t. But that never made sense to me. I can guarantee if Crystal knew Grace’s dad was some big-shot writer, she’d have hit him up for cash, that’s for sure.”
Laura shifts in her seat. The truth about Graye’s parents was only partially revealed during those weeks the trial had dragged on, and had done nothing but confuse things further.
The prosecution claimed Graye had tracked David down, obsessed over the famous absentee father who’d never acknowledged her. They painted it as a potential motive. The press went wild, of course, but no one realized they had only part of the story.
It was simply assumed Crystal Thacker had been David’s lover. They grew up in the same small town, had been near enough the same age. An easy assumption to make. All it would take, even now, is one enterprising journalist with a sense something is off to dig deeper, to discover Margaret and her story. But so far, that hasn’t happened.
And Laura has no intention of spilling Margaret’s secrets to Alex.
“What did you do after that?” She needs to know. She needs this conversation to be done, so she can get as far from this excuse for a human as possible.
“Well, I backed up in a big hurry, first of all. Grace comes running out of the house, covered in blood. If she’d bothered to look, she’d have seen me, but she didn’t. She was completely freaked out, heading back to the little house next door.”
She shakes her head. “I couldn’t believe it,” she says with a smile. “All that effort to make Grace pay, and in the end, I didn’t have to do a thing.”
“The phone call,” Laura whispers. “The 911 call, when Graye confessed.”
Alex winks at her. “Well, almost nothing. I sat there for a few minutes, leaning against the side of the house, soaking it all in. But the sun was starting to come up, and the last place I wanted to be caught was outside a murder scene. I remembered the phone in my pocket, and knew I’d made the right decision not to touch it. I dialed with my T-shirt wrapped around it, pretended to be Graye, then tossed the phone into the house. I didn’t even have to open the door. Grace left it swinging behind her.”
She shakes her head again. “Stupid.”
Laura wonders how many miles she can put between her and this woman before nightfall.
“I got out of there fast after that. I didn’t want to be seen, and I was jumpy, kept thinking I was
hearing Grace coming back. I left on the first ferry back to Rockaway.”
Alex lifts her beer and salutes Laura with it.
“That was the best damn day of my life,” she says. “And you can rest easy. Believe me, they got the right girl.”
That isn’t the reason Laura has driven all this way, but she finds she’s lost the stomach for any more games.
“Alex, what happened the night your mother died?” she asks outright.
This is the question that keeps her up nights. This is the question she can’t get past, the truth she sifts through Fiona Boyd’s manuscript hoping to puzzle out.
Alex gives her a slow smile, a smile Laura will see in her nightmares for many nights to come.
“Exactly what they say happened. I killed her. I’m not ashamed of that. I’d do it again, given half the chance.”
Laura nods and rises to go. She’s done here.
She turns and walks away without a word.
“Hey,” Alex calls out. Laura pauses but doesn’t turn back. She’d prefer not to see Alexis Thacker again. Ever.
“Ask Nick, if you don’t believe me,” she calls.
Laura resumes walking toward the door.
If this is what sisterhood is like, Laura is glad she’s an only child.
Because the thing is, she does believe her.
Laura may not have had the same amount of alcohol as her companion, but the one beer she did finish over the previous few hours sits sour in her stomach.
Her first instinct is to get as far away as possible, but she can’t face the drive back to Texas in her current state.
She also has no intention of renting a room at the motel next door to the bar. She doesn’t want to wonder if she’s taking bedbugs back home with her, but also, she’s loath to give Alex an easy way of finding her.
Not that she will. Laura has a feeling Alex has wrung all the enjoyment she can get out of sharing her truth. Laura serves no further purpose for her now.
She makes it half an hour, just to the outskirts of Kansas City, when she sees an exit proclaiming a decent hotel chain around the corner. She turns the car in that direction.
The Shadow Writer Page 27
