The Weight of Silence (Nicole Foster Thriller Book 2)

by Gregg Olsen

  God, I’m so stupid. Stacy is back. And I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that whatever plans she has concocted are short-circuited once and for all.

  There. I admit it. I want her gone for good.

  The drive out to the Quinault Beach Resort & Casino is only twenty miles, but it’s a beautiful twenty, winding through groves of firs contorted by the weather off the Pacific. I play every possible scenario in my head. I think of what she wants. I think of telling her what I really think about her and the kind of creature she’s become. I think about things getting out of hand. She and I have always had a tendency to move in that direction. She’s the button pusher, but I have pushed back in a weak, passive-aggressive way. One time she made me so angry that I used her favorite hairbrush to clean the toilet. Mean, I know. Childish, yes. Somehow it made me feel better when I watched her brush out her hair and gloat over its perfection in a handheld mirror that she used like a periscope to look at me.

  I never told her.

  Maybe I will now.

  Like she would care.

  As I pull into the Quinault to park, I scan the lot for Stacy’s fancy rental, but I don’t see it among the rows upon rows of cars from Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. She’s probably using a valet to park her car. My sister never missed an opportunity to have someone else do something for her. My fingers stay tight on the wheel, and I sit there looking up at the casino. I have not been in one for three years. When the department had a team-building evening there, I pretended to be ill and called in my regrets. Carter knew why. Probably others did too. No one says to my face what they know about me and the turn of events that brought me back home, but I can see it in their eyes sometimes. It’s a mix of pity and disdain. I pretend that I don’t see it. It’s the only way to move past it all.

  I try to reach up and turn off the engine but find that I’m unable to move. I’m stuck. I strain a little.

  You can do this. This is not about you. This isn’t really about Stacy. It’s about Emma. All of this is about her.

  A voice in my head tells me that Stacy has summoned me to the casino to remind me that I am weak. I wonder if she’s watching me from her room. My fingers finally let go, and I swing open the car door. The air from the Pacific is a hot, wet dog’s breath. I start for the entrance, and the pulsing energy of the casino spills over me. I see the lights. I smell the cigarette smoke. A couple with tan legs and hard bodies wanders out with smiles so big that I can only assume they won. The man is nearly giddy. The woman is saying something about getting a new car.

  Won big. I’ve done that. I know that rush.

  The lobby hints at the coastal Indian people who own and run the Quinault. Dark fir beams support the ceiling. Stacked stone covers the feature wall. The carpets are rich and muted. It’s a place that says Northwest, but not overly so. In a way it is nearly tastefully bland. A few historic images add an unobtrusive pop of interest. One side of the lobby leads toward a bank of room elevators. The other side is a wide-open entrance, a vacuum designed to suck people onto the casino floor. I turn my head only slightly. I tell myself not to look. But I do. The vacuum tries to pull me in the direction of all those pretty lights, those smiling faces, those people drinking free watered-down highballs and thinking that they have a chance.

  A chance to pay for their trip to Hawaii.

  Remodel a bathroom.

  Get a face-lift.

  Buy a new car.

  I am not that person. I’m just not. I know it. And yet I still look at the scene beyond. Sweat drips under my arms. Bile pushes upward once more. My heart races.

  Fuck casinos.

  Fuck Stacy.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Friday, August 25

  I knock on the door of Stacy’s third-floor room. Though the casino’s clatters and hums are muffled, they are insidious as they burrow their way into my consciousness. Distracting me a little. Adrenaline is coursing through my bloodstream, telling me to be alert. Reminding every fiber in my being that my sister is a cobra. She will strike when I least expect it.

  The door swings open. I see her pretty but characteristically cold eyes. Her hair is no longer blond, and that startles me. It’s colored and cut a little like the no-nonsense bob that I’ve employed since becoming a detective.

  “Professional,” she said to me when I adopted the look, “but so not sexy.”

  “Cops aren’t supposed to be sexy,” I had told her then.

  “They are on TV,” she said with a grim little smile. “At least, the ones that matter are.”

  I study her just now. She’s tanned. Thin. Glamorous even with my hair.

  “Oh God,” she says, lurching in my direction. “I knew you would come.” She holds me, and it feels like the way a crab holds fish bait. She cranes her neck to look behind me.

  “Did you bring her?” she asks.

  “No,” I say, bracing myself. “I didn’t.”

  Her eyes don’t change, but I can see the fine lines around her mouth tighten. “Well, why not?” she asks.

  I let out a breath. I’m not going to let her push me. I hold the cards. Emma is mine.

  “Because she thinks you’ve gone to heaven, like Cy,” I say.

  Stacy pushes the door shut behind me. “You told her that? Why in the hell did you do that, Nic? I wasn’t dead. You know I wasn’t dead.”

  I want to say that I thought by saying it, somehow it would become true.

  “I know,” I tell Stacy. “I didn’t know what else to say to her. It was triage, Stacy. You know that more than anyone.”

  She pulls at a sweater that I know costs more than a week’s salary at the Aberdeen PD. I notice a coil of gold chains around her pretty, sun-freckled neck. I always admired her neck. I guess I admired everything about her beauty. My sister is older now, but she still looks like the teenager who literally lorded her perfection over me when she found her way down the stairs and into the front room of our house in Hoquiam. She swirled around the room, reminding our father that she was the flame to which all moths flew.

  To end up burned and dead, I think now.

  I scan past my sister. The room is large, a suite with a grand piano. I want to remark about how I didn’t know she played, but I hold my tongue. I see no evidence of Julian, but I ask her anyway.

  “Are you alone?”

  She leads me to the bar.

  “You mean is Julian here?” she asks.

  “Right. Is he?”

  She retrieves a bottle of sauvignon blanc from the ice bucket. It’s a good bottle. Stacy is predictable. That might be in my favor.

  “No. I’m sorry. And this might be hard for you, because I know you had feelings for him—”

  “He played me,” I say, cutting her off. Julian was as much a traitor, a betrayer, as Stacy. He’d reeled me into my sister’s web because he could—because she made him. “I gave up feelings for him a long time ago. Where is he?”

  She positions two glasses in front of her, fills both, and hands one to me. This gesture is a little grand. I’m thinking she wants us to toast something. I take a drink right away. Stacy’s back. I can’t drink to that.

  “It’s pretty sad,” she says, not looking sad in the least. “And I know what you are going to think.”

  I immediately know where this is going.

  “He’s dead?” I ask, my eyes locked on hers.

  She turns away and walks over to the window and looks out at the churning surf of the Pacific.

  “A boating accident,” she tells me.

  I want to laugh, but I don’t. You never laugh at a shark.

  “What happened?” I ask, though I know she’ll lie.

  “We were living outside of Puerto Vallarta. Oh God, you would love our place. Right on the ocean. White sand as far as you can see. Really, a dream come true.” She pauses, looking out at the water again. “Funny how this is the same ocean, but it’s so different here. Grim. Dark. Cold. Nothing like our home in PV.”

&n
bsp; I don’t roll my eyes, though I really want to.

  “What happened, Stacy?” I ask, pushing only slightly.

  She sips. The old diamond from her wedding to Cy is gone, replaced by a stone even larger, surrounded by bloodred rubies. Fitting, I think.

  “We were out sailing, and I told him that the weather report indicated a potential squall. It was a freak accident. Really. Just one of those things you never think will happen.”

  I can’t hold it inside. “Like the freak accident that killed Cy?” I ask.

  She sips her wine. It is almost like she doesn’t really hear me.

  “Not fair, Nic,” she says. “You can be so mean when you want to be.”

  She’s never seen me really mean. That will change if she tries to take away Emma.

  “Sorry,” I say, though I’m not in the least.

  “It’s fine,” she says. “I’m okay now. That’s not to say it hasn’t been hard on me. I’m a survivor.”

  Like a cockroach after a nuclear war, I think.

  “What exactly happened to Julian?”

  “I didn’t see it happen,” she says. “I was below deck. I heard a thump. It was pretty rough. I called up to him, but he didn’t answer. When I got topside, he was gone. They found his body the next day. He’d hit his head and lost consciousness and drowned.”

  She’s acting a little emotional. Her hand is shaking, and she’s rubbing at her eyes. I don’t see any evidence of tears. I’ve seen this act before.

  She changes the subject. “Should we get dinner?”

  “No,” I say. “This isn’t a social visit.”

  “Why not?” she asks, planting herself on one of the love seats that face each other.

  “I don’t trust you, Stacy.”

  She swirls her wine.

  “I would think you would.”

  “After what you’ve done?”

  “We,” she says. “After what we did.”

  I want to hit her. “We didn’t do anything. You did.”

  “You knew what I was going to do.”

  I shake my head and set down my glass. If not for Emma, I’d be out the door and into my car.

  “I told you not to do it,” I say.

  “But I did. And you knew. And you didn’t tell anyone. You are just as culpable. That’s how I’ll play it if I have to.”

  She’s threatening me, but I quickly dial back my emotions. Stacy is like a fire that exists only to seek more fuel. She wants to explode. She wants to burn me. I refuse to be kerosene. I don’t say anything more about Julian.

  “What do you want?” I ask, trying to soften my voice.

  “I want to see my family. I miss my sister. My father. My little girl. Is that so impossible to understand?” she asks, once more trying to get a chorus of violins going, but failing. She’s a good actress, I’ll give her that. But I know the real Stacy. “You always try to insinuate that I don’t have any real feelings,” she goes on, “and that’s super hurtful, Nic. Really.”

  I take a seat in the love seat facing her. It’s an oxblood shade, deep and made of leather. I feel like I’m being swallowed alive. I indicate that my glass is empty, and Stacy gets up to fill it and her own.

  “You saw Dad,” I say as she sits back down. “You saw me. And I know that you hung around the day care to spy on Emma. How did you even know she was there?”

  “The staff at Ocean View let me update Dad’s contact card. So nice of them. I saw the day care address as a potential contact point in case something happened to Dad during the day.”

  “Nice,” I say.

  “You’ve done an amazing job with Emma,” she says.

  “She’s an amazing girl.”

  “I can see that.”

  “You can’t have her,” I say, once more setting my cards on the table.

  “I’m her mother,” she says.

  “I didn’t say you weren’t. That doesn’t mean you can have her. Come on, Stacy, you know you don’t really want her.”

  Stacy looks into her glass. “You really don’t know me at all.”

  “I do. I do,” I say.

  Her eyelids flutter a little. “You can’t know what it’s like because you’ve never had a child of your own. You’ve never even had a husband. But I’ve missed her every second I’ve been away. I have. I really have. It has been even harder since Julian died.”

  I know she’s lying. She only cares about herself. She only cares about taking away something that belongs to someone in her way. A boyfriend. A job. A husband. A child. While it wasn’t apparent when she was born—and her sociopathic behavior only emerged later—I know that Stacy can’t help how she is wired. She was born that way. Mom’s influence only shaped what Stacy was inside. It must be horrible to make a life out of wreaking havoc on others. I don’t even want to think about it, because when I do, I feel sorry for my sister.

  “I told her you were dead,” I remind her.

  “That was a mistake,” she tells me. “How did I die, by the way?”

  “Car accident.” It’s what I told Emma. At the time, however, it passed through my thoughts that I should have said that she’d died in a house fire. Her face burned beyond recognition. Slow and painful.

  “Not very original,” she says.

  “Not everything has to be over-the-top, Stacy,” I say.

  “I like over-the-top.”

  We sit there silently for a moment. It’s our game. She’s thinking of a way to hurt me. I’m thinking of a way to kill her for real.

  “I have a right to see my daughter,” she finally says.

  “Not the way I see it.”

  “She’s mine. I could just go get her and leave town.”

  “Over my dead body,” I say.

  She gives me a stare. “I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, Nic.”

  Translation: Thanks for the idea, big sister, but I already had it in mind.

  “You can’t have her, Stacy. You know that, just like our pony and Cy and Julian, you’ll tire of her. That’s who you are and that’s who you’ll always be.”

  Stacy’s glass is empty. Her lacquered nails scratch at the armrest. “That’s what you think of me? Wow. That’s really cruel. I thought you were the kind one. Most people who knew us growing up always saw you that way. There’s a mean streak in you, Nic. I won’t be bullied by you.”

  That’s a laugh-out-loud statement, but I don’t respond accordingly.

  “When are you leaving?” I ask, cutting to what I really want to know.

  Stacy leans in my direction. “After I see Emma. Then I’ll go.”

  The love seat takes another bite of me. “How am I supposed to make that happen?” I ask. “She thinks you’re dead.”

  My sister shrugs her shoulders. “That’s your problem.”

  My sister’s right. I’ve made things worse. My best intentions were a mistake foolishly wrapped up in hope. “You only want to see her?” I ask.

  Stacy’s eyes bore into my own. I almost look away, but I don’t. “I’ve seen her. I want to talk to her. Let’s not play games here, Nic.”

  “You aren’t here to take her from me?” I ask, letting my weakness seep into my voice. A mistake, I know. She’s getting to me. Like she always does.

  “No,” Stacy says. “I promise.”

  “I’ll need some time,” I say. “I have to undo something that could be very traumatic.”

  Stacy pushes. “How much time?”

  “A day or two. A couple days. I don’t know. I never thought you’d come back.”

  I never wanted you to come back, I think, but don’t say it.

  “That’s fine. I’m going to spend some time with Dad. Nice place, Ocean View. Expensive.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “Your gift to me was used to pay for it.”

  “I know,” she says. “And it wasn’t a gift, Nicole. You extorted the money from me.”

  “I needed the money,” I tell her.

  “And now I need to see my daughter. I’d s
ay we are even.”

  We have never been even. Not one time in our entire lives. My sister was a parasite and I was the host and that’s the way it always was.

  “Fine,” I say as I get up from the jaws of the love seat. I’m upset, but I don’t show it. The wine she poured me is mixing with my already-upset stomach. “I need to go now. I work for a living.”

  “Been following the hot-car case,” she says. “Can’t imagine anyone more horrific than Luke Tomlinson. What he did to his little girl is unconscionable. Some people are outright vile.”

  “Yes,” I say. “They are.”

  You are, I think.

  I leave my sister in her suite and make my way down to the lobby.

  The elevator doors open, and there it is, beckoning me.

  The casino.

  I can’t turn away. It’s a bloody car crash—the kind that leaves the sheen of blood on the roadway and taunts each passerby. The flashing lights of the ambulance and police cars that arrive to pick up the pieces. You know you shouldn’t really look, but you just can’t stop yourself. You can’t. Impossible. The lights of the casino are the same thing. Disaster that sucks me in. I don’t have anything to stop me from going inside. I’m reeling. It’s almost as though I’m a marionette and Stacy is the puppet master. Every part of my being is tingling. It is better than any sexual encounter I’ve ever had in my life. I feel hot. Sexy. I’m wet. And yet what’s surging through my body has nothing to do with another human being.

  It is the Double Diamonds machine that winks and leers at me from across the casino floor.

  Damn you, Stacy.

  The woman at the desk takes my credit card.

  “Only a hundred dollars,” I say, though I know that if I lose, I will be back in front of her. She’s beautiful with tan skin and shiny black hair that she wears long to look the part.