Now That She's Gone

by Gregg Olsen

  She couldn’t see anything. She went back to the door and knocked again.

  “Tami? It’s Mom. Are you home?”

  Again no answer.

  For a second Lynn wondered if her daughter was avoiding her. She’d felt that their phone call the night before had gone fairly well. At least for them. If Tami didn’t want to see her, she should at least have the common courtesy to let her mother know by coming to the door.

  She was raised better than that.

  The irony of her thoughts tugged at her. She had tried to do her best. She’d gone to group meetings for parents of drug addicts. She’d gone to counseling for herself to see what it was that she could have done to raise a girl who’d stick a needle in her arm.

  Lynn went around the back of the house to the slider and cupped her hands over the glass so she could mitigate the reflection and get a better look inside. The TV was on in the front room. A coffee cup sat on the counter next to a half-full carafe. On the floor was a fairly neat pile of toys—mostly stuffed animals and a few little trucks and things that her one-year-old could hardly find that enchanting.

  Except maybe to suck on. Jax was teething.

  Then she saw the baby. Right in the midst of all the toys, just sitting there, crying.

  The door was unlocked—something that she’d hold her tongue about when she found Tami—and she went inside, scooping up her grandson.

  “Where’s Mommy?” she asked, looking around and finding her way down the hall, looking in each bedroom and the main bathroom. The house was spotless, which made her feel good, but it also bothered her that she even cared about that right then.

  Something was wrong.

  The curtains were drawn in the master bedroom, making it impossible to see. She flipped on the lights, but they didn’t work. With the baby on her hip, Lynn pulled back the heavy-lined curtains and let out a scream.

  Tami was on the bed, her eyes open, but unresponsive. A syringe was stuck in her arm.

  Lynn, in a panic, started to hyperventilate. She set the baby down on the corner of the bed.

  “Tami! Tami! What have you done! Tami!”

  She reached over and pulled out the syringe, throwing it across the room.

  “How could you do this to me? To Jax? To Joe?”

  She felt for a pulse.

  Thank God! Praise Him!

  Tami was alive.

  Lynn called 911.

  “Please hurry! My daughter’s alive! But she’s overdosed on drugs!”

  The man from the Comm Center told Lynn to hang tight, keep an eye on Tami’s vitals, and help would be there. A volunteer paramedic unit was less than a quarter mile away.

  “Was she suicidal?”

  “No, she wasn’t.”

  “Was she a habitual user?”

  “No. No. She was a mother. She’s a wife. All of that is in the past. Please, just get here. Save my baby.”

  Jax was crying pretty loudly by then and Lynn picked him up and tried to comfort him. She hoped against hope that everything would be all right. The baby boy could feel the terror that his grandmother was experiencing right then. He soaked in all her worry, fear, and let out a scream that Lynn was pretty sure God could hear.

  She certainly hoped so.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Tacoma General Hospital was one of those buildings that seemed designed by committee rather than anyone who cared for people. One had to actually work there to find his or her way around passageways and poor signage that directed the distraught and desperate to whatever floor or room they sought. Lynn Overton sat in a small waiting area outside intensive care. A little boy with pudding on his hands painted the sides of a saltwater aquarium while his mother played solitaire on her iPad. Down the carpeted corridor, Lynn’s only child was fighting for her life.

  Joe, Tami’s husband, arrived a half hour after the ambulance blared its way from the neighborhood. Joe was a handsome young man, a few years older than Tami, but not so much that it bothered Lynn. Jax was with his mother at her place in Port Orchard.

  “You should have told me she was using again,” Lynn said, her lips tight.

  Joe shook his head. “She wasn’t, Lynn.”

  Lynn watched the pudding painter. “You really blew it, Joe. You really messed up. You should not have covered for her.”

  Joe thought hard for a moment. There was some history between himself and his mother-in-law. She hadn’t approved of him at first. Maybe she’d never approved of him at all. He was a peacemaker and he was the one always trying to get Tami to work things out with her mom.

  “You don’t know anything about your daughter,” he said.

  She got up. “Don’t tell me that. She was my little girl long before you came into the picture.”

  “Do you really want to have this kind of discussion here? Now?” He looked over at the solitaire mom, who glanced at him and rolled her eyes upward before going back to her game.

  “I suppose not,” she said. “But it is really hard for me to sit here knowing that she was using again and I had no notice of it. No chance to stop her. To save her.”

  “Like I said, she wasn’t using. And she’s going to be all right.”

  The pair of them sat there in silence. Waiting. Hoping. When a nurse and doctor came out to speak with them, neither needed to hear the words. It was evident by the looks on their faces.

  “I’m so sorry,” said the doctor, a Pakistani with a sweet face and eyes that seemed to glisten with tears.

  “You mean?” Joe asked, now standing and shaking.

  “Yes, I’m so sorry. We couldn’t save her.”

  Lynn just stood mute. The room was spinning. It was the feeling of an earthquake and vertigo and a tsunami all at once. She collapsed back into the chair.

  “Would you like to see her?” said the nurse, a pretty girl with nutmeg hair and light blue eyes.

  Joe nodded. “Yes. Yes. I want to see her.” He turned to Lynn and extended his hand. “Are you coming?”

  Lynn took his hand. None of what was happening seemed real. She might have expected such a scenario years ago when Katy went missing and Tami fell into despair and sought an end to her pain from the sharp tip of a needle. But not now when she’d come so far, had so much for which to live.

  “Why?” she asked, her voice constricted by the anguish in her throat. “Why did my baby do this?”

  The window shades were drawn, and a light next to the bed and completely silent monitors illuminated the space. Tami Overton looked as though she was sleeping. Her eyes were shut, her mouth slightly open. One of the nurses had straightened out the light blue blanket that covered most of her body. Her arms were concealed under the fleecy wrapping. It appeared that her curly dark hair had been brushed or combed.

  The doctor put his hand on Lynn’s shoulder.

  “We are so very sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  Joe knelt down beside the bed and buried his face in the blue blanket.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Overdose.”

  “I know, but how? She was clean.”

  The doctor nodded. “We noticed some old track marks. Very old. The mark from the needle that killed her today is the only new one. She clearly hadn’t been using in a long, long time.”

  “Did she say anything? Did she say anything at all?”

  The doctor shook his head. “Not that I heard. I’m sorry.”

  The nurse spoke up. “The paramedics that brought your daughter in said she did say a few things on the way to the hospital.”

  Joe looked up.

  “What? What did she say?”

  “It wasn’t completely coherent. She said something about being sorry. Something about someone named Katy. That she should have told the truth. That she should have been protected.”

  Lynn asked Joe if she could have a moment with her daughter.

  “There are a million things I never got to say to her,” she said, her eyes weeping tears, but her
voice in full control.

  Joe had every right to say something harsh to Lynn—she hadn’t been the best mother, but she was far from the worst. His own carried that mantle and he knew that his son would need a grandmother who could tell him the good things about the mom he’d never know. He kissed his wife on her smooth, white forehead and whispered in her ear.

  “Oh baby, why didn’t you tell me?”

  With that, he nodded in Lynn’s direction and left the room. The nurse followed behind, shutting the door quietly.

  Lynn planted her knees on the floor and stayed very still for a long time, just stroking her daughter’s hair, thinking back to the last time they spoke. It was a gift from God that it had not been an argument—that the words were charged with love, warmth, and even a little hope.

  “Honey, I thought you were better. I thought everything was going the way you wanted things to go. Your husband, your baby, your education. You told me there were no cracks in the ice . . .” she let her words trail off as she inhaled a deep breath to continue. “The ice under your feet. You didn’t need me to hold you up. You didn’t need Joe to hold you up.”

  She pulled herself closer to her daughter, reaching over the metal sides of the hospital bed that held her like she was in danger of rolling to the floor. Tami was still warm. Like she was merely asleep. Maybe this was a terrible dream. Lynn spoke to God to make it so.

  “Father, I have been a bad mother. None of this would have happened if I had been what I’d been called to be with this great gift of this child. Please, strike me dead now. Strike me dead and return her to life. Please. Do this for me, for her, for her baby, for her husband. Do not make the world a worse place by taking her and leaving me behind. Dear God, hear me. Hear my prayer.”

  She looked up and nothing had changed. Lynn still had an unshakable faith, but in that moment she questioned just why it had to be this way. Why her baby, her troubled baby, should do this to herself. It was all so wrong.

  She grabbed the edge of the blanket and the sheet that covered Tami’s body and peeled it back. She had to see again what it was that had done this evil. What had been the implement of Satan and where it had left its mark.

  Her daughter’s arms were thin. Almost so thin it seemed impossible that anyone—that she—could find a space to insert a needle.

  But there it was. Among a swarm of old faded scars was the red puncture mark of the instrument of Tami’s death. It looked like a bug bite, red, slightly raised but with the clear space of an indentation where the needle had struck.

  Like the depression a toothpick makes when inserted into angel food cake not yet ready to be pulled from the oven.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Janie and Erwin’s only child, Joe Thomas, waited for Kendall to come from the coffee stand inside Kitsap County’s Administration Building. The woman commanding the front desk told the college student the detective was getting coffee and would be back in a moment. A few minutes later, Kendall appeared.

  “Detective Stark?”

  She looked at the young man. They’d never met, but she’d seen his photograph hanging in the Thomas home on Long Lake and the family resemblance was remarkable.

  “You’re Janie and Erwin’s son, aren’t you?”

  He seemed surprised that she knew that.

  “Yeah, I am. I’m Joe. I want to talk to you.”

  “I wish I could help you. We’re not working your mother’s case,” she said. “The FBI is. Do you know something?”

  He shook his head. “No. Nothing about that. That’s not why I’m here.”

  “I am very sorry about what’s going on with your family, Joe,” she said.

  “Me too. But I’m not here about that. I’m here about what happened to Tami. I saw it on Facebook this morning.”

  Kendall didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. “Tami Overton? What did she put on Facebook?”

  “She didn’t. Her mom posted on her wall. Said that Tami killed herself yesterday. Committed suicide or had an overdose. I’m not sure which.”

  Kendall felt the hair on the back of her neck rise.

  “I hadn’t heard,” she said. “Did you know Tami?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We were friends. We both got away from Alyssa and Scott. I was Scott’s roommate at the U, but I transferred to Boise State. Couldn’t be far enough away from those freaks. Tami got into drugs. I think to escape them too.”

  Kendall told him to come into her office so they could talk in a more private setting. He followed her inside.

  “Were you friends with Katy as well?” she asked as he sat down.

  “I knew her,” he said. “Everyone did. She was a good person. She deserved better than her supposed best friend and that two-timer Scott.”

  “What do you mean, two-timer?” Kendall asked.

  “Scott couldn’t keep his pants zipped. To put it mildly. I think he really liked Katy, but Alyssa was determined to get him into her bed. And in the end, that’s just what she did.”

  “Did Katy know about it?” Kendall asked.

  Joe Thomas wasn’t sure and he said so. “I didn’t hang around them much in high school. If I had I would have run the other way when Scott asked me to be his roommate. That was a joke. He kept throwing me out so he could, you know, have sex with Alyssa.”

  “I see. So what brings you here, Joe? What is it that you think I should know?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure. My life’s been turned upside down. The press is hanging around the house. My dad is down so low, I’m worried about him. I don’t know how much more he can take.”

  “I really am sorry,” Kendall said. “I know it must be difficult.”

  “You probably don’t know,” he said, not trying to be unkind, but factual. “My mom’s disappeared with her serial killer lover and my dad and I are sitting around hoping that when they find her she’s dead because we don’t know how we could ever trust her again. I know that sounds terrible, but it’s the truth.”

  Kendall just let his words fill the space of her office. There was nothing she could really say to make him feel better. Words couldn’t take away the stinging pain of what Janie had done to her son and husband. She’d turned their world upside down in a decisive and dramatic fashion.

  “You said you went to Boise State to get away. Get away from what?”

  “The crazy dynamics between Alyssa and Scott. It was like he didn’t have a mind of his own. She did whatever she wanted and berated him for any choice that he made on his own. It was big stuff, like what class to take—she wanted him available to her when her schedule was free. And small stuff too. One time she read him the riot act for buying a Husky T-shirt that didn’t match hers. It was gross.”

  The description was an apt one. Alyssa was the anaconda. Scott the passive victim.

  “Why did he put up with it?”

  Joe waited a beat before answering. “I’ve asked myself that over and over. It was almost she had something on him. Whenever they had a fight, he’d go crawling back to her.”

  “And Tami?” Kendall asked.

  “I knew Tami in school,” he said. “She was a nice girl before she got mixed up with those two. She never drank a beer. Never smoked a cigarette. One time when I came home early from being banished to the library so they could screw, I stood outside the door and heard Alyssa screaming at Scott to do something about Tami.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think her exact words were ‘shut her up for good.’”

  “What do you think she meant by that?”

  Joe swallowed. “Kill her. I think she was telling Scott to kill her.”

  “But he didn’t, did he?”

  He shook his head. “No. Not then. But with all the Katy stuff being dredged up again I wonder about what happened to Tami. That’s why I’m here. Detective Stark, I think they finally shut her up. They didn’t like that she was clean and sober.”

  “You don’t have any direct
knowledge of this, do you, Joe?”

  He shook his head again.

  “No,” he said. “Not really. Just a feeling.”

  Kendall called Birdy and told her what Joe had confided. Birdy said she’d call the Pierce County Medical Examiner’s office to let them know they had an interest in the outcome of the young woman’s autopsy.

  “Let me know how it goes with Tami’s mother,” Birdy said. “I’ll be here.”

  BOOK TWO

  PANDORA

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Brit Frazier paced the room like an agitated feline in search of a litter box. She was tense, stressed. She hated the house her husband had designed. She looked all around her and her stomach twisted. She wanted to throw up. The design was all about him. Nothing about her. Every suggestion she’d made had been dismissed as being out of character with his vision.

  His vision.

  His life.

  His every need had been more important than hers.

  The conversation—battle, really—they had the night after the film crew left was one for the ages.

  “I want you out of here,” she had said.

  “Over what?”

  “You’re a child molester and killer, that’s enough for me, Roger. You make me want to puke. Just the idea that I’m breathing in air that has passed through your lungs makes me want to choke right now. I hate you. I hate everything you’ve done.”

  “You’re losing it, Brit. This is a goddamn TV show!”

  “It’s a reality show,” she told him. “It’s real.”

  “Oh my God, you’re insane.”

  “Stop saying that. Stop it!”

  “It’s the truth. That lying producer and that stupid psycho psychic are to blame for your latest break with reality.”

  “I hate you. I want you gone.”

  “This is my house. I built it.”

  She stared hard at him, her eyes full of hate. “I will tell everyone what I know if you don’t leave.”

  His face reddened. “What you know?”

  “I know what and who you are. Don’t test me, Roger. You don’t want to be up against me because you might think I’m weak, that I’m fragile, but I have never been backed into the corner like this. Get out!”