by Wendy Walker
Still, it was more than just the words Daisy had spoken in those woods.
“What about the note?” Nic asked now. “To Booth—and the texts to her sister?”
“She claims Reyes made her write them. Look—it fits. He forged that note he left at the casino, in the room he charged to your mother’s credit card. He proved himself to be pretty adept at planning a kidnapping and covering his tracks.”
Nic was far from satisfied. It was just now that she was feeling the extent of her anger at how things had unfolded in the aftermath of finding her mother.
She started rattling off the loose ends.
“And what about her sister—Veronica? Forensics found Daisy’s prints and hair all over the house … and I saw that jacket at her house the very same day.”
Watkins had more excuses.
“But they don’t know how old they are, and Daisy explained the jacket—said she stopped to see her sister for the first time that morning … on her way to rescue her daughter.”
Nic continued.
“But the witnesses who saw her over the years—free as a bird! In three different states! She was coming and going as she pleased this whole time! And she had the app for those cameras on her phone. Why would Reyes give her access unless she was his full accomplice? There are so many pieces that paint a different picture!”
Then, a new voice—
“Nicole,” her mother said. The voice was calm, resolved. “You’re forgetting about Alice.”
Nic hung her head. Alice.
The reason Reyes had targeted her mother—the girl who needed a mother.
Alice had been granted visits with Daisy Hollander. The social workers thought it would be good for her, to help put what had happened in those woods into some sort of context. After those visits, Alice had told the prosecutor a string of facts that backed up everything Daisy Hollander said. They were all lies. She spoke about the grate with the bars and the back room and the boarded-up window—all the things that had happened to Molly Clarke, Alice said had happened to her real mother—to Daisy Hollander.
“I still don’t understand why they believe her,” Nic said.
Watkins answered. “Again—this comes down to the discretion of the prosecutor. How can anyone ever prove that he didn’t do the same things to Daisy that he did to your mother?”
The truth was, they couldn’t. Those witnesses who saw her in different towns may have been mistaken about the woman they saw. The girls from the camp may have been jealous, or remembering things wrong. And Veronica would never turn on her sister. Daisy had likely been supporting her for years with money from the cons.
All Nic had was what she’d seen and heard in those woods. Not just the words, but the way Daisy had said them. And her laughter. Daisy Hollander had been willing to kill her own daughter that day. There was no chance she had been Reyes’s victim.
“Well—that’s where we are,” Watkins said. “She will get time. She will pay for the murder. Maybe not what she deserves, but not nothing.”
Then a pause, a sigh. And—
“There is something else, and I was waiting until today so I could tell you in person.”
“What?” Nic asked. “What else could there be?”
Watkins slid a folder in front of them. Nic opened it. There were three photos—one was from a security camera at the casino. The second was of a hole, dug in the ground, on some kind of construction site. The third, a copy of a partial, handwritten note.
Watkins explained. “Daisy’s lawyers hired an investigator. They went back through the footage at the casino and found that—the picture of that man at the registration counter. See the man with the baseball cap? The flannel shirt? That’s Reyes. Those items of clothing were found in the house.”
“So they can prove it was Reyes who charged the room to my mother’s card?” Nic asked.
“And not Daisy—that’s the point. Reyes acting alone.”
“And this second photo—the hole in the ground?” her mother asked.
Now a long pause as Watkins steadied himself. “Some workers found it and contacted the state troopers. It’s a hole near an abandoned building on Laguna Road. A hole big enough for a body. Daisy’s lawyers claim that Reyes dug it so he could kill her and bury her body. They found a shovel at Reyes’s house. The soil matched.”
No, Nic thought. That’s not what it was for, and the three of them in that room knew it. Daisy had been long gone. Reyes had dug that hole to bury her mother after he got his hands on Nic.
She heard her mother draw a long breath, but it stopped short and left her chest. She had just seen her own grave.
“And this one,” Watkins said, “this note was in the house. In the basement where they found his research—papers and recordings and pictures. It looks like he was starting to forge a note—does this mean anything to you?”
Nic looked at the first two lines. “That’s my handwriting,” she said. She read the words out loud. “‘I’m so sorry, Daddy and Evan. I just can’t live knowing what I’ve done to Annie and now Mom. I have thought about the bridge for a long time.’”
“Nic?” her mother stared at her now. “Did you write that?”
“No, but I said those things to him. I told him how I felt guilty about the day Annie died, and about the things I said to you that morning.”
“What about this bridge?” Watkins asked.
Nic hesitated. She didn’t want to say these things in front of her mother. She said them anyway. “I told him how I sometimes thought about jumping from the bridge downtown—he asked me if I had ever told anyone else, and I told him that I had. That I’d told the counselor.”
Watkins nodded, leaned forward. “He was planning to stage your suicide. Plant this note somewhere. Maybe leave your purse on the bridge.”
“And no one would wonder why my body wasn’t found because of the currents.”
“He was going to keep you there. In that house.”
Her mother took her hand and held it tight.
“I think we know enough. I think that’s enough. Thank you, Charles,” her mother said. She was smiling politely, even as a shiver ran through her body.
Nic shoved the pictures back into the folder and slid it toward Watkins.
“Is that everything?” Nic asked him.
Watkins nodded. “For now.” He took a breath, let it out. Placed his palms on the desk.
“Do you still want to go, Molly? To see her?”
* * *
They drove the short distance to the Hastings Inn.
Nic parked. Turned off the ignition. Chief Watkins’s truck was right behind them.
“Are you coming in with me?” her mother asked.
“I can’t, Mom. I can’t look at that girl.”
Her mother nodded.
“I don’t get it,” Nic said. She couldn’t hold back. “Why don’t you hate her? After what she did to you in that house, and how she’s lying now to help her mother?”
There was a long pause, and then, suddenly, a relenting that washed over her mother’s entire body. Her eyes were looking out at the diner, and the little girl whose face was now pressed up against the large glass window.
“She’s just a child, Nicole.”
Nic leaned over and rested her head on her mother’s shoulder.
“You don’t know, do you?” Nic asked her.
Her mother kissed Nic’s forehead. “What don’t I know?”
“What a great mother you are.”
57
Seven months later
I kiss my daughter on the forehead. I smile and watch her leave me. She walks across the street to a bar—not for a drink, but to meet a man. A nice man for a change. And I don’t just hope there will be more nice men. I know there will be.
I leave the car and walk into the diner. Chief Watkins walks right behind me.
I have never been here before. My only memory is driving past it that night. The night of the storm.
Inside, th
ey are waiting for us. Roger Booth. The social worker who’s been looking in on the family.
And Alice.
Oh, how I have dreamed of this day. How I have dreaded this day. I have had nightmares about Alice, her hands petting my skin. Her fake tears. Her faces. And I have longed for her. For the child in her.
She has no ambivalence toward me. I see that now, as she jumps down from the bench of the booth and runs into my arms. I hold her tight. I kiss her forehead, the way I kissed Nicole moments before.
I don’t know what I feel. I don’t think I will know for a long time.
I walk to the booth. Everyone stands to greet me warmly. Roger is grateful because I found his daughter and saved her life. Chief Watkins is grateful because I didn’t leave him to die like a dog in the street. I could have taken his car and driven us away from there. But I stayed, and now they say that he lived because I stopped the bleeding.
I stopped the bleeding. That is something, I suppose.
Somehow I do not feel worthy of their gratitude.
We sit down, tears in all of our eyes, as we talk of the resolutions that have occurred. Alice has started school with other children and she is doing nicely. She is ahead in every level and that is something that those twisted people gave her.
Still, I wonder what remains.
“How have you been?” I ask.
Alice has Happy Face. “Great!” she says. “I love my new school and my new friends. And it turns out I don’t have any allergies, except to cats, but I can have dogs. And I can go outside anytime I want.”
I smile. “That’s wonderful news.”
We are all so happy for this little girl who is doing so well.
This little girl who made me drink milk but then set me free.
This little girl who watched her mother shoot the man who raised her, then felt her press that same gun into her head.
This little girl who has now lied for her.
That little girl.
We eat French fries and drink soda. The social worker leads us in a productive discussion about life and moving forward. She told me when I agreed to come that it was important for Alice to see that I was all right. That I was living a normal life now. That I needed to be a role model since we shared a similar experience in that house, even if I was only there for two weeks.
“I started working again,” I say. This is true. I have started tutoring students in science and I hope I can eventually go back to teaching.
“And my son is almost done with his junior year. I can’t believe how fast time flies!”
It has killed us to keep him at that school. It is that school that links us to this town. It was Evan’s choice to stay.
But when we go, we take the long way. And each time I see him, I remind him that nothing he could ever do would make me leave him. Not ever. Because he is enough. He is more than enough. He is everything. He and Nicole.
I will never speak of that moment in the storm, when my legs carried me away from them. When I walked away.
I am here now. We are here now.
We. That is a word I have been using more lately. John and I drive together when we bring Evan to school. He’s been taking days off from work to come with me. He doesn’t want to lose me again. How strange that it took this horrific experience for him to know this, and for me to believe it.
I feel it more every day since I was saved—my love for John tiptoeing across that invisible line. It has not been a watershed. But it is no longer impossible. I feel it. He feels it.
He doesn’t close his eyes until I am lying next to him in our bed. And, sometimes, I will curl up close beside him.
And Nicole—the changes in her have been more pronounced. She will start college next fall. She has been coming with me to my grief support sessions. Yes, she mocks everyone the second we leave, the things they say and even the way they say them, always in a neutral tone. She calls them emotional robots. She says it makes her want to scream out into the room that they are all full of shit. Maybe she’s right. But she still comes. And sometimes we have dinner after.
Sometimes we talk about the woods in Hastings. Sometimes we talk about what she should study next year, or what classes I might teach. Sometimes we even laugh, though tears often follow.
I don’t mind her tears. I don’t mind my own.
Do I owe this to Jared Reyes? To the horrible things he did to our family? He took me, yes. But he took me to care for a child who was not even his own. He took me to care for her when her own mother left without a second thought. A mother who put a gun to her head. I see them sometimes before I can catch them—images of Reyes and Alice. The way he carried her through the rain. The way he made her laugh. The way she looked at him like any child looks at a parent who loves her.
And then I feel his body pinning me to the kitchen floor. His strong hands dragging me to the dark room. His hot breath in my face when he tells me about Nicole. He was going to kill me and take her.
And now, here is my family, healing. And here is Alice, surviving.
There are so many shades of gray that sometimes I feel life is one long, beautiful, cloudy day.
The conversation lingers and now begins to die. The social worker turns to Alice and says, “Do you want to give her the present now?”
Alice nods. Coy Face is here and it sends a shiver down my spine.
Shades of gray.
She is just a child.
She reaches down into her lap and sets on the table two plastic dolls.
I feel my stomach turn. I feel a violent urge to vomit.
She takes the doll that she calls Suzannah, and she hands it to me.
“I want you to have this so you will never forget me.”
Now come her tears. Real tears. And I feel my own start to well.
I force my hand across the table and take the doll. I swear to God it burns my skin, but I take it anyway.
I take it and I straighten its hair.
Acknowledgments
If anyone could find a way to escape from a caged room to save her child, it would be my mother, Terrilynne Kempf Boling. The lessons she taught us about never, ever, accepting defeat were in my head in each of Molly Clarke’s chapters, and behind every courageous thing I have ever done. I am grateful for the tenacity of mind and spirit she often employed to get us out of scrapes when we were growing up, and which now reside within us all. Thanks, Mom.
There are never enough words to express my deep appreciation for my agent, Wendy Sherman. Thank you for the unwavering, never-ending, 24/7 and 365 dedication to fostering my career and providing both sound counsel and brilliant guidance. And to Michelle Weiner and Olivia Blaustein at CAA and Jenny Meyer, thank you for always finding new homes for my work.
To the team at St. Martin’s Press, thank you for championing this book from the very start. Specifically, to my editor, Jennifer Enderlin, for encouraging me to lean in to the emotional and psychological aspects of this story while safeguarding the twists and turns. To Lisa Senz, Katie Bassel, Brant Janeway, Erica Martirano, Jordan Hanley, Naureen Nashid, and Sallie Lotz for your creative and tireless efforts in sales, public relations, and marketing. And to Olga Grlic, for nailing the cover!
To my sister, Jennifer Walker, and the team at Walker Drawas—thank you for jump-starting my online presence with sheer cunning and impeccable style.
To Kathleen Carter, thank you for taking me on with this book and working your magic to spread the word.
As always, I relied on experts for advice with the more technical aspects of the book, from apple-seed poisoning to grief psychology. Thank you to Detective Christy F. Girard and Dr. Felicia Rozek.
Thanks also to Callie Dietrick for her great notes, Pamela Peterson for listening to every idea and reading the same chapters over and over, and Carol Fitzgerald at BookReporter.com for my gorgeous website and for always being in my corner.
To my ever-expanding family—you fill my life with joy and stuff to write about. To “the council
”—thank you for the great company, cosmos, and soul-lifting laughter. To my lifelong friends—thank you for holding my history and helping me remember what matters most.
Writing a book about the bond between a mother and her children was an incredibly emotional journey for me. Along the way came the breathtaking recognition of the depth of love I have for my own sons and the vulnerability that love creates. I did my best to honor the power of these relationships while writing Don’t Look for Me. Thank you Andrew, Ben, and Christopher for being such incredible young men, and for being on this journey with me.
Also by Wendy Walker
The Night Before
Emma in the Night
All Is Not Forgotten
About the Author
WENDY WALKER has worked as an attorney specializing in family law. She lives in Connecticut, where she is at work on her next novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1. Day one
2. Day thirteen
3. Day One
4. Day Thirteen
5. Day Two
6. Day Thirteen
7. Day Two
8. Day Fourteen
9. Day Two
10. Day Fourteen
11. Day Two
12. Day Fourteen
13. Day Five
14. Day Fourteen
15. Day Fourteen
16. Day Fourteen
