Catch Me

by Lisa Gardner

  I wanted to touch that hair. Hold it in my fist. Feel this softer, shinier version of my mother.

  My mother looked pretty. It both fascinated and terrified me.

  “Sugar and spice and everything nice,” my mother singsonged. “Oh, but Charlie honey, nice girls finish last. You don’t want to be last. The world wants brave little girls, tough little girls. Sugar and spice and broken glass, that’s what little girls should be made of.”

  She scooped up the first spoonful of peanut butter. “Here comes the airplane. Come on, Charlie. Be a good girl for your mommy. Open up. Here comes the airplane, into the hangar, vroom, vroom, vroom…”

  LATER I VOMITED BLOOD. We went to the emergency room. The nurses rushed me in, fussed all over me. I was poked, prodded, the doctor flashed a light in my eyes. I held my stomach and whimpered. But I didn’t cry. Good girls were brave. Good girls were tough.

  Pain. Wracking cramps, eye-rolling diarrhea, my face bursting with sweat, but I promise, promise, promise, no tears rolling down my cheeks.

  “I just don’t know what to do,” my pretty, shiny mommy was telling the doctor. “I turned my back for only a moment, and next thing I knew, she was eating a lightbulb. I mean, really, Doctor, what kind of child eats a lightbulb?”

  Good girls are brave. Good girls are tough.

  “It’s just so hard, sometimes, being a single mom. I mean, I’d just popped into the kitchen to make her favorite peanut butter sandwich, and well, I was doing laundry and trying to pick up all the toys in the family room and clean the bathroom. And yes, a lightbulb had burned out, so I’d gotten one down to replace it, but I never thought for a second, never imagined…I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to cry. I just haven’t slept in so long. You have no idea how active she is and impulsive and…And now this and we don’t have insurance and, and…I’m sorry, can I just sit down for a minute?”

  Good girls are brave. Good girls are tough.

  The doctor patted my mother’s shoulder. The doctor told my mother everything would be all right. The doctor told my mother she was doing the best she could and he understood completely.

  I rolled over, held my stomach, and vomited more blood.

  Wanted to talk. Wanted to find my voice, but my tongue was swollen and my cheeks hurt and my throat burned.

  Another nurse standing beside me. Wiping my mouth with a cool cloth, touching my forehead with gentle fingers. I stared at her. Dark eyes, dark hair. Kind face. Speak. I wanted to. I tried to open my mouth. Could feel the urgency of it, the desperate need to. Had to speak, had to speak.

  Not about the lightbulb, not about the peanut butter.

  Something else I had to say. If I could just say…

  Good girls are brave. Good girls are tough.

  I opened my mouth.

  The nurse turned away. Across the room, as if sensing my intent, my mother glanced over the doctor’s shoulder, met my gaze, and triumphantly smiled.

  * * *

  I WOKE UP IN THE BLIND-DARKENED ROOM of my Cambridge rental. Pulse pounding. Hair damp. Gray tank top glued to my sweat-plastered skin.

  Words were still on the tip of my tongue. The words I never got to say back then, the words it took me years to slowly but surely remember:

  Baby’s crying.

  That’s what I’d wanted to say. What I’d felt a desperate urge to tell the doctor, the nurse, someone. Except in theory, I didn’t remember a baby. In theory, my mother only had me.

  Baby’s crying.

  Down the hall, I thought now. And for a second, I could almost taste a name, feel it like a scent in the air, a ghost of a ghost of a memory. A baby girl. Down the hall. Crying.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Pressed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets as if that might help. To remember. To forget?

  I never knew. All these years later, I never knew.

  My mother hurt me. I knew that. She was not well. So sick, in fact, that after that last incident, she was sent away permanently. A mental institute I guess, because that’s where sick people generally went, and jail would’ve involved a trial, and that I would’ve remembered.

  My mother went away. That’s what Aunt Nancy told me the first day in the hospital, and I never brought it up again. Mentioning my mother’s name risked summoning the demon. So I never asked and Aunt Nancy never told.

  Something bad had happened. Worse than usual. And I knew what it was. Deep down inside, I understood that I knew everything, that in fact I remembered everything. But I didn’t want to remember what I remembered. So I didn’t. By a conscious or subconscious act of will, I took the past, boxed it up, and put it away, never to be seen again.

  Maybe not the best coping strategy. And not without consequences. Turns out, when you wall off pieces of your mind, you can’t control everything that disappears. To this day, I have haphazard recall at best. Time escapes me, days, weeks. Entire conversations with best friends, the vital last lecture that happened right before the final exam.

  Jackie and Randi used to tease me I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t attached to my shoulders. I’d laugh with them, but often self-consciously. Jackie had really called me on the phone last night, we’d talked for two hours, and I’d forgotten all of it? Randi had told me all about her first date with local heartthrob Tom Eastman, and I couldn’t recall a single detail?

  Small glitches in the operating system, I’d tell myself. I mean, given the amount of resources I’d dedicated to wiping eight entire years from my general consciousness, some errors were bound to occur. Besides, no matter how much I screwed up, forgot, genuinely overlooked, those occasions were still better than the few times I started to remember.

  Recall was most likely to happen when my anxiety spiked. Then the past would leak out in my dreams, snippets from an old movie reel, where once upon a time, a thin crazy mother lived in a tiny dirty house with her thin lonely daughter. And the mother fed her daughter shattered glass and slammed her fingers in kitchen drawers and pushed her down steep flights of stairs because little girls needed to be brave and tough.

  Until one day, the little girl grew to be so brave, so tough, that she won the war.

  That, I felt in my bones. My mother did something. But I won the war.

  And I didn’t ask about my mother anymore, because in my heart of all hearts, I understood that answer might tell me everything I still wasn’t prepared to know.

  Baby’s crying.

  Girl. Stuffed bear. White ruffles, pink polka dots. Sugar and spice and everything nice…

  Don’t remember. Block it out. Shove it away. Nothing good can come from the past, especially a past like mine. Not to mention, at this stage of the game, what would be the point?

  A hunted woman doesn’t need closure. A hunted woman needs battle skills.

  I stood abruptly, glanced at the clock in my shadowed room, and calculated the time remaining until 8 P.M., January 21. Zero hour. When my own killer would finally come calling.

  Seventy-eight hours to go.

  I put on my workout clothes, grabbed Tulip’s leash, and prepared to run.

  MY FATHER LIVES IN BOSTON. Only argument Aunt Nancy and I ever had was about him, so again, another topic rarely broached and even less frequently considered. But yes, I have a father. Rich guy. On his fifth, sixth wife, last I heard. I have siblings, too, half siblings I guess. I’ve never met any of them, and I have no illusions my father is any more of a parent to them than he is to me.

  My dad has a sperm donor approach to fatherhood. Meet a young pretty girl, knock her up. If she’s young enough, pretty enough, surgically enhanced enough, maybe marry her, too. Until of course, the next young pretty thing comes along, in which case, hey, he’s a guy; he can’t help himself.

  I guess he met my mother while on vacation at the grand old Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods. She was seventeen and working as a housekeeper. He was thirty and looking for entertainment. According to Aunt Nancy, my mother told him she was pregnant. He didn’t marry
her, but sent money. Sperm donor, check writer. See, a hell of a guy.

  He never followed up on my care. At least that’s how the story goes. Lost touch with my mother in the very beginning, which surprises me a little. Not that he’d let me go, but that my mother would let him go. Maybe she tried. But she would’ve been a mountain mouse and he’s some big city finance guy, came from money, makes even more money, has a long and enduring value system wrapped up in his own self-importance. She probably never stood a chance.

  I guess the cops in upstate New York called him first, after the incident. My mother had his name listed as the emergency contact, though no phone number. Police, however, are a bit more skilled than mentally ill twenty-five-year-olds, so within a matter of days, they tracked him down. He was not in the country, however. Paris, London, Amsterdam. I don’t recall.

  He bounced them to Aunt Nancy, who did the honors of assuming responsibility for a niece she’d never met. Even then, she ran a business, the call came out of the blue, so it took a few more days while she made it from the wilds of New Hampshire to the even deeper wilds of upstate New York.

  Those days remained hazy for me. I remembered waking up in the hospital. I remembered being surprised that I was alive. Then I remembered feeling deeply, deeply disappointed.

  A social worker sat bedside. She had black hair cut in a short bob that showed off a sharp, angular face. Not a kind-looking person. Not maternal. She looked hard and spoke in a clipped voice.

  The doctors had removed my appendix, maybe some other things. Apparently, spending years eating small doses of glass and rat poison was not good for various internal organs. But I was healing well, she’d assured me. I’d be just fine.

  And again, I was so deeply, deeply disappointed.

  I never spoke to her. Or the nurses. Or the doctors. They had betrayed me. They had forced me to live. I’d hated them for that.

  Eventually, my aunt had arrived. She’d taken my hand, and that quickly I went from being my mother’s child to being my aunt’s niece.

  That was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

  Aunt Nancy was my mother’s older sister by six years. She had silver-gray hair cut Brillo short. Premature gray hair ran in the family, I was told. Like blue eyes and strong jawlines. But the gray color suited my aunt, brought out her steel blue eyes, her high cheekbones. My aunt could care less. If my mother was obsessed with male attention, then my aunt was equally obsessed with keeping men at arm’s length.

  When their parents died in an auto accident—in New Hampshire you’ll notice lots of signs advising you to brake for moose; you really should— my aunt took over the parenting role. My mom was a wild one, even back then. And my aunt was the responsible one, even back then. Needless to say, their relationship was strained even before my mom got knocked up by a wealthy Boston financier.

  They went their separate ways until one day, the phone rang and my aunt learned about an incident, a niece, and yet one more unexpected life change.

  Like any kid, I never appreciated my aunt, until one night, my own phone rang with news of an incident, a tragedy, an unexpected loss. And I turned to my aunt for guidance, because given a choice between being my mother’s daughter and being my aunt’s niece, I’d take niecedom any day of the week.

  My aunt is brave. My aunt is tough.

  Fuck chewing shattered glass.

  Run a bed and breakfast with little help and no health insurance in the mountains of New Hampshire, where in January the daily temperature will start at negative twenty and most of your Boston guests will have forgotten to pack hats, scarves, and gloves and will consider it all your fault.

  I thought of my aunt now, as Tulip and I slowed at an intersection, waited for the light to change, then sprinted through the crosswalk. I thought she deserved better than yet another life-changing phone call on January 21.

  I thought, heart pounding from the exertion of my six-mile run, sweat pouring down my face, dog trotting beside me, gun quickly accessible in my fanny pack, that I was glad my aunt couldn’t see me now.

  Because she’d have taken one look at me and understood that even if I was winning the battle, I’d lost the war: I’d become the spitting image of my mother, down to the bruised eyes, hollowed out cheeks, and hard-lined face.

  The mountains had left me. My aunt had left me. Living in isolation, fighting paranoia in a big city, I had become everything I knew better than to be.

  These days, I was my mother’s daughter.

  Except I didn’t chew shattered glass anymore.

  I carried a. 22 semiauto. And this evening, sometime after 7 P.M., I was going to prove once again that I knew how to use it.

  Chapter 10

  HELLO. My name is Abigail.

  Have we met yet?

  Don’t worry, we will.

  Hello. My name is Abigail.

  Chapter 11

  RHODE ISLAND STATE POLICE DETECTIVE SERGEANT Roan Griffin had the voice of a bear and the build of a boulder. Big guy. Probably bench-pressed small automobiles after toppling sumo wrestlers and tackling linebackers. Good-looking guy, too. Officer Blue Eyes, the Providence Journal had dubbed him years ago, when he’d appeared on Dave Letterman to model the state police’s award-winning new uniforms.

  Truth was, the Rhode Island State Police had a reputation for the best-looking cops in New England. No one knew how they did it. Maybe a special factory that chiseled out broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, square-jawed men. Either way, whenever there was an opportunity for cross training with their Rhode Island counterparts, the female officers of Massachusetts quickly signed up. Like, all three of them.

  Currently, D.D. was on the phone with Griffin. A shame, really, because Rhode Island’s headquarters was only an hour south, and given the restaurants available for lunch in Providence’s Federal Hill…Missing out on sightseeing and Italian dining, D.D. thought with a sigh. So much for the new and improved lifestyle.

  Griffin was a married man. Actually, his second marriage, as the first wife had died of cancer. Wife number two was a blond advertising executive named Jillian. D.D. had never met her, only knew her because of the press coverage. Jillian had survived the notorious College Hill Rapist about eight years back. Her younger sister hadn’t been so lucky. When they’d finally arrested a man for the attacks, Jillian had formed a group dubbed the Survivors Club in order to assist one another through the trial. Except there hadn’t been a trial, given that the suspect had been gunned down outside the courthouse and Jillian and her fellow club members had gone from sympathetic victims to prime suspects.

  D.D. would be the first to admit she’d followed the case as zealously as Nancy Grace, especially when days after the alleged rapist’s murder, another woman was attacked. Seriously, there were days on this job when she thought not even a suspense novelist could make these things up.

  Griffin and Jillian had two boys now. Ages four and six, D.D. was learning. The youngest, Dylan, had taken a page out of his father’s book and was all football all the time. The six-year-old, Sean, had recently discovered cooking. As in last night he’d prepared rack of lamb for the entire family.

  “With a pomegranate molasses marinade,” Griffin was finishing now, “though I suspect his mom helped him with that.”

  “He’s six. How’d he even lift a roasting pan into the oven?” D.D. wanted to know.

  “Oh,” Griffin said breezily. “He gets that from me.”

  “And the hot oven…not a problem?”

  “Jillian did the honors of taking it out. And she helped him sear the outside on the stove. But he found the recipe—”

  “Where? At the back of his comic books?”

  “He checked out a cookbook from the library. He’s a how-to kid. No fiction, but brings home books on how to plant gardens, how to engineer robots, how to build boats. Guess now it’s gonna be how to cook.”

  “Rack of lamb. That’s amazing.”

  “Hell, it was fabulous. I’m ready to start a colleg
e fund for Johnson and Wales.”

  “I don’t know about cooking yet for baby Jack,” D.D. said. “But last night he threw up something that might pass for molasses.”

  Griffin laughed. That was the great thing about parents and homicide cops—nothing ever grossed them out. She could tell diaper stories all day, and her fellow detectives would actually find that charming. D.D. wondered sometimes how normal people lived.

  “Is he sleeping at all?” Griffin asked.

  “No.”

  “Try driving around?”

  “No. Too afraid I’ll fall asleep.”

  “What about during the day? Does he nap?”

  “Some. When you’re holding him, or when he’s in his carrier, then he passes out cold.”

  “Okay,” Griffin said briskly, “so Dylan wasn’t much of a sleeper when he was an infant. I’d take him for short drives in the car seat, get him wiped out. Then return home and place his carrier directly in his crib, with him still strapped in. Worked like a charm for weeks. Then pretty soon, we could just place him straight into the crib. Maybe being in the carrier helped get him acclimated to the crib? Hell if I know, but it worked.”

  D.D. pursed her lips, nodded. “Sounds like something worth trying. Or I could just sign up for the funny farm now.”

  At the last minute, she realized maybe she shouldn’t have said that. Given Griffin’s own past, that little incident with the Candy Man, Griffin’s ensuing mental breakdown, the medical leave from the state police.

  Griffin just laughed again, sounding unruffled. D.D. took that as a sign his new family was working for him. She hoped so. Griffin was a good guy and great detective. If he was happy, maybe there was hope for the rest of them.

  “So,” she declared, “as delightful as our children are, I’m actually calling you about a case. Randi Menke, murdered in Providence two years ago. Guess the state police became involved because you were already investigating the number one suspect for fraud.”