by Lisa Regan
“What’s that?”
“Nothing, nothing. She must have found another identity to assume. Or went back to her real identity—whatever that is.”
“Did she have any family?” Noah asked.
Josie shook her head. “No. I mean, if she did, she never told me about them. I was a kid. I never asked her.” I tried not to talk to her at all.
“I’ll send someone to all the places on this list, see if we can come up with anything,” Noah said. “Even if we don’t find anything that way, we’ll dig into the real Belinda Rose’s life. Maybe they knew one another.”
Chapter Eighteen
JOSIE – SIX YEARS OLD
Fingers trailed over Josie’s scalp, stroking her hair gently. Nestled in her bed, her small hands clutched the fuzzy pink blanket her gram had given her for Christmas. It was her favorite thing in the world after Wolfie. Poor Wolfie, she hadn’t seen him since the night at the hospital.
“JoJo,” her daddy whispered.
Her eyes snapped open and she smiled, a hot spike of pain shooting from her ear all the way down to her chin, making her wince. She’d nearly forgotten. Her daddy’s face floated above her bed, half-smiling, half-worried. She knew his worried look. One of his eyebrows always went up like a fuzzy caterpillar bending in the middle. Reaching up, she traced a finger over it, trying to smooth it down.
“Daddy,” she said. “Is it wake-up time?”
Again, he brushed her hair away from her face, careful to avoid the dressing. “No, honey, it’s still nighttime.”
“Don’t you have to go to work?” Josie asked.
He smiled, and his worried caterpillar brow arched more. “Not tonight, sweetie. I need to talk to you. We’re going to go to Gram’s, okay?”
“Will Mommy come?” she asked.
Her daddy looked away from her, at the closed door, and then back. “No. Mommy’s staying here.”
Josie tried to hide how happy this made her.
“JoJo,” her daddy said, shifting on the edge of her bed. “I need you to be very quiet, okay? At least until we get out to my truck. Can you do that for me?”
Wide-eyed, Josie nodded.
He got up and walked over to a small duffel bag near the door, shoving things into it—her clothes and toys. She was just about to ask how long they were going to be at Gram’s house, when there was a thump against her bedroom door. Both of them jumped. Her daddy turned just as another loud blow shook the door. Then her mother’s voice shouted, “Goddamnit Eli, what are you doing in there?”
Her daddy didn’t answer. He just stood there in the middle of Josie’s room, duffel bag in one hand.
“Unlock this door, Eli. Right now,” she snarled.
“Daddy,” Josie whispered. “I’m scared.”
Chapter Nineteen
One week later, Josie found Gretchen and Noah standing awkwardly in front of her desk. “What do you mean we have a problem?” she asked.
Noah sat in the guest chair while Gretchen began pacing, her notepad in hand. She took out a pair of reading glasses and perched them on the bridge of her nose before flipping a few pages. She read off the names of every person she had talked to at the Department of Human Services. None of them meant anything to Josie.
“Stop,” Josie said. “You’re telling me you talked to all of those people, and they all told you the same thing?”
Gretchen looked up at her. “Yes. The Belinda Rose file is not there. The Department of Human Services does not have it.”
“Not there?” Noah asked. “Meaning it could be somewhere else? Do they have off-site storage?”
“No, they don’t. All the county records are stored in one place—at the main office in Bellewood—and Belinda Rose’s file is not among them,” Gretchen said.
“So, they lost it,” Josie said.
“They wouldn’t go that far,” Gretchen replied.
Noah laughed. “Which means they lost it. Or it was destroyed somehow, and they don’t want to take the heat.”
Josie ran a hand through her hair. “Okay, well, surely they had some kind of file for Maggie Smith. She ran the home Belinda lived in.”
Gretchen waved her pen in the air. “Yes. That’s the only lead we’ve got at this point. Turns out Maggie Smith got married in the late ’90s, moved on from the foster home program, and became Maggie Lane. She and her husband traveled the country in an RV until he died of a heart attack.”
“That was in her personnel file?” Noah asked, perplexed.
Gretchen smiled. “No, I got that from one of the DHS workers. Office gossip. She was new to the office when Maggie left to get married. Maggie had been running the group home for almost thirty years, so it was quite the hot topic of conversation at the time.”
Josie asked, “How old was Maggie when she got married?”
“In her sixties. That was the other reason for all the gossip. She waited her whole life to get married, and then her husband was dead within ten years. It’s terrible.”
“She gave up her position at the group home in the late ’90s,” Josie remarked. “That was twenty years ago. Which means she would be in her mid-eighties. Is she—is she still alive?”
“Yes,” Gretchen said. “She is currently a resident at Rockview Ridge, right here in Denton.”
Chapter Twenty
JOSIE – SIX YEARS OLD
Josie pulled the covers over her head, curling into the tightest ball she could manage. Smaller, she needed to be smaller. The shouts from just outside her door punched through the air, penetrating the flimsy wood and slapping against her small bed. Again, Josie wished she had Wolfie.
“She is my daughter too, Belinda,” her daddy said.
“So what? You’re just going to take her and leave me? Leave me here alone?”
“I told you last week this wasn’t working.”
Her mother’s voice became a screech. “Go then. Leave!”
Something thudded against Josie’s door. She squeezed her body tighter, pressing her forehead to her knees.
“I’m taking my daughter,” her daddy said.
“She’s not yours! She’s mine!”
“The hell she is.”
There was a series of thuds and then a crash, and Josie heard what sounded like glass breaking. Then her mother’s voice, mean this time, like the way it sounded in the hospital when she grabbed Josie’s face. “I told you, you’re not taking her. She stays here with me.”
“You forfeited your right to be her parent when you put a blade against her face. You think I don’t know you did that? Twenty-seven stitches, you sadistic bitch.”
“You can’t prove a goddamn thing. Now get out. You’re not taking her.”
“Get out of my way, Belinda.”
“You think you can take the only thing I have and leave?”
“That’s what I’m doing, isn’t it? You’ve got some real serious problems, Belinda. Josie’s not safe here. I’m taking her to my mother’s.”
“Oh sure, run to your mommy.”
Josie heard a rustling, then a thump. Then her daddy said, “I don’t want to hurt you, Belinda, but I will if it means protecting Josie. I’m taking her. Now get out of my way.”
Her mother laughed, and Josie’s body stiffened. Her heart felt like it was taking too long between beats.
More crashing. Then her daddy’s voice came again, and this time he sounded different. “Belinda,” he said. “Where did you get that?”
“You’re not taking her, Eli.”
“Let’s talk about this.”
More of her mother’s laughter. Josie felt a strange feeling like she might pee herself. She tried to hold it in. Her mother would be really mad if she wet the bed.
“Oh, sure, now you want to talk,” came her mother’s voice from the other side of the door.
“But not here,” her daddy said. “Let’s take a walk, okay? Get some fresh air? We can talk this through.”
“We can talk all you want, Eli, but you’re not t
aking her.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Sitting high on a rock-strewn hill at the edge of town, Rockview Ridge was Denton’s one and only skilled nursing facility. Josie’s grandmother, Lisette Matson, had been a resident there for several years now. Lisette was Josie’s last living relative—besides Josie’s mother—and her best friend. Josie visited her regularly and knew exactly where to find her at this time of day. She spotted Lisette’s silver curls the moment she walked into Rockview’s cafeteria; lunch was over, but several residents lingered, reading magazines, watching the communal television and, like Lisette, playing cards. She looked up and smiled, waving Josie over.
“You’re never here this early in the day,” she said as Josie leaned in for a kiss.
“I know. Work stuff.” Josie took a seat across from her grandmother.
A game of solitaire was spread out before Lisette. She snapped a card down onto one of the piles and said, “I guess you don’t have time to play.”
“Sorry, Gram. Listen, I need to ask you some questions.”
Lisette frowned. “Is everything okay? What’s going on?”
Josie reached across the table and patted Lisette’s hand. “Don’t worry. No one is missing, or shot, or dead. Okay, well that’s not entirely true.”
She told Lisette about the discovery of the real Belinda Rose’s remains behind the trailer park. “We believe that my mother stole this girl’s identity. I need you to tell me everything you remember about her.”
Lisette’s gaze slipped to the table. Slowly, she gathered her cards and began shuffling them. “Josie,” she said, and her tone filled Josie with dread. It was the tone she had used when she caught Josie drinking at age sixteen, the tone she had used when she found out that Josie and Ray were having sex; it was her warning tone, the tone that said, “I can’t stop you from traveling the path you’re on, but I’m telling you to be careful.”
Josie’s heart did a quick double tap. “Gram,” she said softly. “If my mother did something to this girl, I have to know.”
Lisette still didn’t look at her. “That woman is best left in your past, Josie. Have you forgotten how hard it was to get her out of our lives?”
“Of course I haven’t. Believe me, if I had a choice, I would run screaming in the other direction. I don’t even care that she’s not who she said she was—but I have a murder to solve, and she has a connection to the victim.”
Lisette stopped shuffling and placed her deck on the table, tapping the sides one by one until the cards were in perfect order. Josie thought she saw her eyes glisten over.
“Gram, please.”
Suddenly her grandmother’s fingers were digging into Josie’s forearm with a strength and fierceness that belied her eighty-five years. Eyes wide, voice low, Lisette leaned in and said, “You think I don’t know the things she did to you, Josie?”
Josie resisted the urge to pull away, even as pain spiked through her arm. “Don’t,” she choked out.
“I know, Josie. I know about what she did.”
“Please, Gram. Don’t.”
“That’s why I fought so hard for you. That’s why I did the things I did. You remember that.”
Josie couldn’t catch her breath. Lisette’s fingers dug in deeper, and Josie swore she felt her skin bruising.
“I should have killed her when I had the chance,” Lisette added.
“Gram!”
Josie looked around, but none of the residents in the room were paying attention, and Gretchen, who had accompanied her to the home, was still at the front desk making inquiries about Maggie Lane.
“I would have,” Lisette went on. “I wanted to, believe me. It would have been the best thing for all of us, but I was afraid I’d get caught and then you’d have no one.”
Josie peeled her grandmother’s fingers from her arm one by one and placed Lisette’s hand on the table. “Gram, please. That’s in the past. Just like you said. I’m not trying to resurrect all of that, but this case has to be solved.”
“You can’t be the one, Josie. You have to stay away from her. You’ve got officers beneath you. Let them do this.”
Josie covered Lisette’s hand with her own. “And they’ll come in here and ask you the same questions I’m about to ask. I’m the chief of police, Gram. No, I don’t have to lead the investigation, but I do have to oversee it. Just tell me what you can remember.”
“You promise to stay away from her?” Lisette said.
“As much as I can,” Josie answered.
Lisette pulled her hand away and stared down at her lap. “I don’t know much more than you do, I’m afraid. Your father brought her over a few times in the beginning, introduced her as Belinda Rose. We had no reason to disbelieve her.”
“What about her past?” Josie asked. “Did she ever talk about family or where she was from?”
Lisette was silent for a moment, and Josie could tell by the way her gaze drifted upward to the ceiling that she was searching her memory for any scraps that remained from before Josie’s birth. “She didn’t have any family,” Lisette said. “That’s what she said. Grew up in foster care. I remember that because I felt sorry for her. She was quite beautiful, your mother. When I met her, she was young, and I remember wondering why wouldn’t any family adopt such a sweet, pretty girl?” She humphed. “Well, now we both know why. Unfortunately.”
“I thought I heard her tell people her family was dead,” Josie said.
Lisette shrugged. “She told a lot of different stories. She told your father and me that she had grown up in foster care. But after she left, I talked with the attorney who represented her in all the custody disputes. He said he didn’t even know where to begin looking for her because she’d told him that her entire family perished in a house fire.”
“Did she ever say where she was from?”
“Bellewood. Said she grew up around there, but that she had been moved from home to home all over the state.”
“Did she have friends? A job?”
“No friends that I ever met. She used to clean houses though, I remember that.”
“For a company or on her own?”
“Oh, I don’t remember. I didn’t ask. She stopped working after you were born anyway.”
“Where did she and my father meet?”
Lisette gave a wan smile. “Where else? A bar. There used to be one down the way from the trailer park, but it was torn down ages ago.”
“The trailer we lived in—whose was it?”
“Your father’s. Well, he rented it from the park owner. When he died, she just kept making the payments. The owner tried to charge me for the damage to the place when she left since it was still in Eli’s name.”
“Do you know if she lived in the trailer park also? Before she met Dad?”
“I really don’t know, love,” Lisette answered. “I don’t think she did. Your father said there were a lot of drugs in the park back then. He always worried about that with you. I wanted him to move back in with me after you were born, but he said your mother wouldn’t allow it. Anyway, I think maybe she knew people from the bar who lived in the trailer park or went there to get high.”
Josie sighed. The bar her grandmother referred to was long gone, and the drug activity that had plagued the trailer park had been eradicated during Chief Harris’s tenure. Josie could have someone canvass the park, but she doubted anyone would have useful information sixteen years after the fact. Besides, by the time Josie’s mother met her father, she had already been using the Belinda Rose identity for over a year, at least.
“Gram, do you have any photos of her?”
Lisette’s mouth formed a straight line. A moment later, she said, “I don’t think so. Your mother didn’t like having her photo taken, and back then we didn’t have phones with cameras, so we didn’t take pictures every single day of our lives. We had actual cameras with rolls of film that had to be developed, and that cost money—”
“Gram,” Josie said, trying to ke
ep Lisette on track.
Lisette smiled. “I’ll give you my photo albums before you leave, and you can go through them.”
Gretchen appeared in the doorway of the cafeteria. She nodded at Lisette, and Lisette waved back at her. “You’re not just here to talk to me, are you?” Lisette asked Josie.
“I’m afraid not, Gram. Do you know Maggie Lane?”
“I know who she is—she doesn’t come out of her room much. Had a stroke a couple of years ago and hasn’t felt like socializing since. Therapy brought her brain and her speech back, but she doesn’t get around very well now. Only ever talked about her husband, and he’s been gone a few years now. Don’t worry, she’s still lucid, but I think she’s just one of those who’s waiting to die. I can take you to her room if you like?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
JOSIE – SIX YEARS OLD
Her mother shook her from sleep, pinching Josie’s shoulder so hard that pain shot all the way down her arm. Josie opened her bleary eyes to see her mother’s face floating above her in the lamplight. “JoJo,” she whispered. “Wake up.”
Josie felt her body stiffen. Slowly she sat up in the bed and looked at her mother. Strands of her mother’s black hair floated around her head. Frizzies, her mother called them. They only appeared when it rained. Wet black streaks ran down each of her cheeks. She was crying.
Something was wrong. Very wrong.
“Mommy?” Josie said.
Her mother’s soft, sympathetic smile punched fear into Josie’s heart faster than if she’d held the shiny knife to Josie’s face again. “Wh-where’s Daddy?” Josie asked.
Her mother shifted on the bed and took Josie’s hand. “Baby, I’m so sorry… your daddy did something very bad tonight.”
Josie stared at her, confused. “What happened?”
Her hand gently stroked Josie’s forearm, causing the hairs to stand to attention. Josie suddenly wished her mother wouldn’t answer; each word of her reply was like a barb in Josie’s skin.
