by Chelsea Cain
“Gretchen is spotted everywhere,” Archie said, fingering the still-folded paper. “She’s like Elvis.”
“It’s a still from a security camera,” Sanchez said. He snapped the paper from Archie’s hands, unfolded it, and returned it to the table. “Look at it,” he said, tapping the printout.
Archie looked down. The image showed a close-up of the driver’s side of a car, probably taken from a camera mounted to a customs booth. The vehicle was a white SUV, though Archie couldn’t see enough of it to determine the make or model. The woman behind the wheel had her blond hair pulled back and was wearing a white blouse. The car window was rolled down and her arm was outstretched, a passport in her hand. She was smiling, apparently at the customs agent who was about to receive the passport. The passport was blue, but a blacker blue than the U.S. passport. The woman was reaching toward the customs agent, but she was looking right up into the camera. There was no doubt in Archie’s mind that it was Gretchen.
“How did she get through?” Archie asked hoarsely.
“She had a Canadian passport in a different name,” Sanchez said. “A fake, obviously, but a good one. It didn’t raise any flags. The car was registered in the same fake name as the passport. We have the plates, but she’s probably dumped it by now.”
Archie’s pulse throbbed in his throat. He swallowed hard. “The entire world is looking for her, and she manages to drive over a border? She’s not even wearing a disguise.”
“Exactly,” Sanchez said.
Of course. It was the smartest move she could make. Everyone expected her to have altered her appearance. No one was expecting Gretchen Lowell to look like Gretchen Lowell.
“The customs agent had just finished training,” Sanchez continued. “She’d probably been watching. It was the kid’s first solo shift. He’s on leave now. I suspect he won’t be going back on the job anytime soon.”
“What name did she use?” Archie asked. “On the passport?”
“Isabel Stevens,” Sanchez said. “Does that mean anything to you?”
Archie’s head stung. He reached up and scratched at the fresh scab. “Isabel was the name of Jack Reynolds’s dead daughter,” he said quietly. He chuckled darkly. He had only learned about the name Stevens a few months before. It was the closest he had ever gotten to Gretchen’s past, and still he knew only what she had allowed him to discover. She was always one step ahead. And she was reminding him of that. “And Stevens was the last name Gretchen used when she was a teenager in the foster system.” He glanced up at Sanchez. “But you knew that.”
“Why would she use Isabel?” Sanchez asked. “Of all the people she killed?”
“It means something to me,” Archie said. He touched his pants, making sure that the brass pillbox was still there.
“You want to share?” Sanchez asked
Gretchen had maintained that she hadn’t, in fact, killed Isabel Reynolds, that it had been Isabel’s brother Jeremy. Jeremy had been a spoon short of a full drawer and he’d sure as hell had an unhealthy obsession with the Beauty Killer. Archie half believed Gretchen was telling the truth. Then again, Gretchen never told the whole truth. But Jeremy was dead, and that was a hornet’s nest that Archie didn’t feel like kicking. “It won’t help you,” he said.
They were quiet for a few moments, the photo between them on the table. Sanchez fished the tin of mints out of his pocket again, and put one in his mouth. This time he didn’t offer one to Archie. “You want to change your mind about protection?” Sanchez asked.
“No point.” Archie was still studying the image. It was the same with every picture of Gretchen—he had trouble tearing his eyes away. But there was something about her expression in this one—the way she was looking at the camera—that made him feel like she was looking right at him, into him. He reached for it, his throat dry. “Can I keep this?” he asked.
“Knock yourself out,” Sanchez said.
Archie pulled the photo toward him and stood up. The pills rattled in his pocket. The plastic bottle knocked against the brass pillbox.
Sanchez stood up as well, and the two walked around the table and met at the door. “You need to figure out who your friends are,” Sanchez said.
“You have no idea,” Archie said.
Gretchen had been Archie’s friend. Until she had drugged him, strapped him to a gurney, and started cutting him into small pieces. This was one of the things Gretchen had taught him—his instincts, always so reliable when it came to crime, could fail him when it came to people. It was why Archie had so few people in his life—he was never sure when someone was going to slip him a paralytic and start torturing him—and that sort of uncertainty tended to put a strain on relationships.
Sanchez leaned close to Archie. It was an intimate gesture, as if he were about to share a confidence, even though they were the only people in the room. Archie could smell the peppermint on his breath. “Take care of yourself,” Sanchez said.
The caution implied danger. But what was Archie supposed to be in danger from? Gretchen? Jack Reynolds? The pills in his pocket? And were Sanchez’s words a warning, or a threat?
“I always take care of myself,” Archie said.
The statement was such an obvious lie that it made both men grin.
CHAPTER
22
Archie drove Susan home. The roses Cooper had brought were still on the porch, limp and wilted. Her mother had probably walked right by them. Susan stooped to pick them up, noticed that Archie was waiting for her to get inside before he drove away, gave him a wave, and opened the front door. She was greeted by the smell of warm caramel and the sound of Jefferson Starship blasting on the turntable. She found her mother in the kitchen. Bliss’s platinum dreadlocks were separated into two long braids and she was wearing a T-shirt with an image of a marijuana leaf on it and the word LEGALIZE, along with red and orange tie-dyed yoga pants. There was a pot of melted caramel on the stove and several dozen blushing green apples sitting on the counter.
Clearly, her mother had not been exactly panic-stricken about Susan’s disappearance. “Seriously?” Susan said. She stalked to the sink and began stuffing the roses in the compost bin.
“I’m making caramel apples for Halloween,” Bliss explained.
“Not that,” Susan said. That was pretty evident. “Didn’t you wonder where I was?” The roses were long stemmed and Susan had to use a dish towel to protect her hands as she folded and smashed down the bouquet on top of decomposing orange peels and tea leaves.
Bliss paused, the wooden spoon in her hand hovering over the pot of caramel. “You called me two hours ago,” she said.
“I mean before that,” Susan said. She jammed the lid on the compost bin and tossed the dish towel aside. “After I disappeared yesterday.”
“Don’t put those roses in the compost,” Bliss said. “They’re soaked in pesticides.”
Aha! So her mother had noticed the roses on the porch. She just hadn’t wanted to pick them up without a Hazmat suit. Susan snatched up the compost bin and emptied the entire contents into the trash.
“Bill told me you’d gone to a party at Leo’s father’s house,” Bliss said, stirring the caramel. “I assumed you’d spent the night.”
“Did he tell you the part about the big man and the black car and me acting strangely?” Susan asked.
Bliss set the spoon down. “Honey, you always act strangely.”
“I was kidnapped, Mom. Held against my will. Like the Lindbergh baby.”
“I thought you were on the island,” Bliss said. She picked up a wooden Popsicle stick and jammed it into the bottom of an apple. Juice bubbled out where the stick separated the flesh.
“I was on the island,” Susan said.
Bliss licked the juice off her fingers. “They wouldn’t let you leave?”
“Not really,” Susan said. “I mean, it was implied that I shouldn’t leave. Leo was supposed to bring me home this morning. But then Archie showed up in a mud-covered tuxedo with blood on his head.”
Susan knew this was sounding ridiculous, but she continued. “He got me out of there. Then an FBI surveillance van picked me up. And I had to go to FBI HQ downtown. I’ve spent the last hour trying to identify mug shots of Russian gangsters. They wouldn’t even let me draw masks on any of them, even though I told them that was the only way I’d ever recognize anyone.”
Bliss picked up the apple that was now firmly secured on a Popsicle stick and, holding it by the stick, dipped the apple into the pot of hot caramel. “Was the party fun?”
It was all the yoga and meditation, Susan decided. Her mother had thrown herself into both since Pearl had been killed. It was possible she had actually meditated her blood pressure down to a permanent semiconscious state. Susan threw a glance at the caramel apples Bliss had already finished and laid out on wax paper. “No one eats those, you know. Their moms make them throw them away. It’s got to be store-bought, or it might be poisoned or filled with razor blades.”
Bliss lifted the apple and held it above the pot, letting the extra caramel drizzle off in thick ribbons back into the pan. “I know,” she said. “But I’ve been making Halloween treats for twenty years, and I’m not going to stop because some people are paranoid,” she said. She set the apple down on the wax paper with the others, and stabbed another Fuji with a Popsicle stick. “That’s when the police state wins,” she added.
Pearl had only lived with them a few days. She was a seventeen-year-old runaway who had once Tasered Archie to the point of unconsciousness, but Bliss had always had a soft spot for anyone with an anti-authority streak. It had been more than two months since Pearl had been dragged from their house and murdered. Bliss still wouldn’t talk about it.
Still, you’d have thought with all they had been through that her mother would be a little more concerned about Susan’s welfare. Gretchen Lowell was on the loose. A psycho had snuck in their back door with a machete last summer. Pearl had been murdered.
“I’m going to lay down,” Susan announced huffily.
“Lie down.”
“Whatever.”
“Susan?” her mother said.
Bliss was standing over the caramel pot, an apple in her hand. The Jefferson Starship album hit a scratch and skipped. For the first time, Susan noticed how pale her mother was, the circles under her eyes. She hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep since Pearl had died. Bliss looked down and jammed another Popsicle stick into an apple. “What are you doing, sweetie?” she asked.
“Excuse me?” Susan said.
Bliss wiped her hands on a dishrag, came around the counter, put her palms on Susan’s cheeks, and stared deep into her eyes. Her hands smelled like marijuana and caramel and coconut-scented lotion. Susan didn’t like where this was going. “You have all these story ideas,” Bliss said gently. “These book concepts. You can live here, rent-free. But you have to do something.”
A thread of panic pulled tight in Susan’s stomach. “I freelance,” she protested.
Bliss smoothed Susan’s hair. “You haven’t written anything in two months,” she pointed out.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” Susan said, voice rising. “Did I mention that I was kidnapped?”
“You can’t wait for life to fall into place, sweetie,” Bliss said, squeezing Susan’s head between her hands. “Don’t worry about the direction. Just move.”
Susan stammered, not knowing how to respond. This was all she needed, new age wisdom from her mother. This was a woman whose pubic hair was currently waxed in the shape of a pot leaf and who had once woken up to find a tattoo of Salvador Dalí’s mustache on her hip with no memory of how it had gotten there. “Just move? Did you see that on a bumper sticker?” Susan asked.
Bliss let go of Susan’s face. “Your father said it once to me,” she said. “We were high on psilocybin and wandered away from a Rainbow Gathering into a national forest and got lost.”
Susan didn’t point out the fact that most likely her father hadn’t meant those words to be some big metaphor—he was just trying to get them out of the woods. She didn’t want to quibble. Her mother wasn’t wrong. Susan didn’t exactly have a five-year plan. The Herald would certainly never take her back. Susan looked down at her pale, hairy knee poking through the hole she’d pulled apart in the black opaque fabric of her tights. It had started out the size of her pinkie, but she’d worried it and worried it and now it was big enough to put her arm though. How could she take care of herself? She couldn’t even take care of a pair of tights. She couldn’t even remember to shave her legs. “Don’t worry about the direction,” Susan repeated. “Just move. Got it.”
“And sweetie?” Bliss said, walking back around the counter.
“Yeah?” Susan said with a sigh.
Bliss’s smile vanished and she gave the caramel pot a determined stir. “Everyone loves my caramel apples,” she said. She picked up a Popsicle stick and stabbed another apple.
“I know,” Susan said.
Bliss gave her a satisfied nod.
“I’m going to lie down,” Susan said, turning for the stairs.
“Pigs can’t look up,” Bliss said.
“Excuse me?” Susan said.
“Pigs can’t look up,” Bliss said. “They can’t see the sky.” Bliss gave Susan a helpful smile. “We all have problems.”
“Thanks,” Susan said slowly. Bliss’s smile widened. Susan jabbed a thumb at the stairway. “I’m going to just move to my room now,” she said. Then she swiveled around and marched upstairs, the wooden stairs creaking under her feet. The smell of caramel followed her down the hall all the way to her bedroom. She thought of it that way now—her bedroom. When she’d first moved back in with her mother she had thought of it as her childhood room, or the guest room, or the room in which she was staying, or her mother’s meditation room. But it had been over a year since she’d moved back home, and more than seven months since she’d been fired from the Herald, and it wasn’t feeling so temporary anymore.
She didn’t even bother to kick off her shoes before she flopped down on her futon. Her hair-spray-coated hair crunched as it hit the pillow.
Halloween. Susan wasn’t sure she could take it. All those people acting like it was fun to splatter fake blood on their clothes and savage innocent pumpkins. If any kids came to their house dressed like Gretchen Lowell, Susan was going to pepper-spray them.
Then there was Leo. Had Susan really thought he’d choose her over his obsession to put his father in jail? Was he supposed to drop everything and get her off the island? He’d allowed her to be used as some sort of bargaining chip. And then he hadn’t even shown up the next morning to make sure she got home. That had been Archie, as usual.
The light of the late-morning sky poured through Susan’s sheer curtains. Downstairs, Bliss flipped the record over and side B of Jefferson Starship’s Knee Deep in the Hoopla drifted through the floorboards. Susan knew that album by heart. Every word. It had been her father’s album. When she was ten, he had taught her how to play “We Built This City” on the kazoo. She’d sounded good, too. It had only occurred to her later that her father’s enthusiasm for the song was ironic.
She rolled over on her side and put a pillow over her head, and then practically choked on the trapped hair-spray fumes. This wasn’t even Jefferson Starship’s best album. She threw the pillow on the floor and sat up.
It was useless. She was too wound up to sleep.
Susan got out of bed, pulled her laptop off her desk, got back under the covers, and started to write.
CHAPTER
23
A cheerful sign on Rachel’s front door spelled out HAPPY HALLOWEEN in silver glitter. A small black cat made out of tinsel and wire sat on the hall floor just to the left of the door. Archie nearly tripped on it. He took a minute, before he knocked, to recover some composure. He ran his hands through his hair and wiped the grit from his eyes. He touched the scab at his hairline to make sure it wasn’t actively bleeding. It wasn’t. This was as good as it was going
to get. He knocked.
Rachel opened the door within moments. Her face lit up when she saw him and her smile widened into a huge grin. She was radiant. He had never seen her look happier. She lifted her arms as if she were going to throw them around him, but then her eyes filled with tears and she lifted her shaking hands over her mouth. Her shoulders trembled. “Sorry,” she said. She gulped back a small sob. He could see the lines of worry on her face now, the tension in her arms. She glanced at him, and there was a flicker of terror in her eyes. “I thought you were dead,” she said.
Archie stood in the doorway, confused. The pills were wearing off, and he felt headachy and tired. He had not expected Rachel to burst into tears at the sight of him. If his brain had been working faster, he might have been quicker on the uptake. But it took him a long moment, standing there dumbly as she sniffled, to put it together.
She had been worried about him.
Archie had not seen that coming. He’d been an idiot. It simply had not occurred to him that she would worry, not like Debbie had. It just wasn’t their dynamic. “I got your messages,” he said. She had left four messages last night, and another three that morning. He had not called her back. The texts had been casual, just checking in. He had missed the signals.
Their dynamic, apparently, had changed, when he wasn’t looking.
For a detective, he wasn’t very good at noticing these things.
Rachel wiped the tears off her cheeks. She was still sniffling. She could barely look at him.
“I had bad cell reception,” Archie said. He reached a hand and touched her wet cheek. “I’m not dead,” he said.
Her eyes moved up his face and stopped at his hairline. She swept a forelock of his hair to the side and studied his head wound, the line between her eyebrows deepening.
“You should put some ice on that,” she said. Then she stepped back. It was an invitation.
Archie slid past her into the apartment. She was wearing tight white jeans tucked into brown boots, and a fitted white T-shirt and vest. Her blond hair was tied back into a ponytail. He caught a whiff of vanilla and coconut and could feel his body respond. He tried to distract himself.
