Braden thinks back. Monday. The first full day here in the house. “She went to school last Monday. She’s gone to school on all the school days.”
“She didn’t stay there. She left with Ethan before classes started, and then she texted she was here. With you. Getting acquainted, she said.”
“Ethan? You think she’s with him now?” Braden sounds unusually threatening, even to himself. A mistake. Steph’s gaze goes back to the wine stain. Her hand reaches into her backpack and emerges with a can of pepper spray.
Braden raises both of his hands, palms up. “Whoa! Easy there. I swear I don’t know where she is. She comes home in the evening and goes straight to her room. She gets up in the morning and leaves. If you feel the need to search the house for body parts, you go right ahead. The freezer is in the basement.”
Her hand tightens on the pepper spray. “You think I’m stupid? I’m not going into the basement. I’ve got nine-one-one all lined up, too,” she says. “No sudden moves.”
“You’ve been watching too many cop shows.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. You stay right there.” She backs out of the kitchen and into the hallway, pepper spray at the ready.
Braden follows at a distance as Steph opens doors and looks into rooms. Pepper spray is not a life experience he feels the need to undergo.
“Allie?” Steph calls. “Are you here?”
“I was joking about the body parts,” Braden objects. “Do you really think I’m holding her captive?”
“If you didn’t already kill her. We don’t exactly know anything about you, do we? Gone all these years. You show up and Allie goes missing. What am I supposed to think?”
He follows her up the stairs. She yanks open the door to Trey’s room, then freezes. “Oh. Oh no.”
Even beneath the thick coat of makeup, he can see she’s gone white. She sways a little, her breath coming in shallow gasps. Braden pries her fingers off the doorknob.
“Come away,” he says, very gently, his annoyance melting into sympathy. He has got to do something about that room; the shock of it is overwhelming.
Tears well up and spill down Steph’s cheeks, making black tracks of mascara and eyeliner. One hand comes up over her mouth to suppress a choking sound. Pressure grows behind Braden’s own eyes.
He closes the door. “Come away,” he repeats. She doesn’t recoil from his hand on her shoulder, and he steers her back down the stairs to the living room and into a chair. Gets her a glass of water. She lets him put it in her hand, but doesn’t drink, just sits there with silent tears making those black rivers down her cheeks.
“It’s horrible.” Steph’s voice is softened and subdued. “I mean, I knew, but I didn’t know. You know?”
Braden presses the heels of his hands into his eyeballs until white lights explode into his skull. “I know. You really haven’t seen Allie, at all?”
“Once. On Monday. I already told you. She came to school in the morning, but then she left with Ethan and she hasn’t been back.”
So many questions.
“What do you know about Ethan?” He tries to keep his voice casual, turning his back to look out the window.
“Not Allie’s type at all. Skips school. Parties a lot. She took off with him on the motorcycle that morning. She texted me in the afternoon, and I haven’t heard from her since.”
The fierce rush of protectiveness that floods through him is new to Braden. His fist clenches, and again he flashes to that instant of impact with a jaw.
His knuckles aching. Darkness, snow, a freezing wind cutting through his clothing. He’s not wearing a jacket.
Why on earth was he not wearing a jacket? Or gloves? He was raised inland, he knows about winter, isn’t stupid enough to wander around in the snow without the appropriate protection.
In the present, he takes a breath. Tries to corral his thoughts. Okay. Allie went off with Ethan a week ago today. She came home that night. She’s been home every night, so she hasn’t been raped and murdered.
“She said she was going to school. Every morning when she left,” he says, back to repeating the obvious.
“Didn’t you get a robocall?”
“A what?”
“A robocall. What kind of parent doesn’t know about that?”
Steph is starting to recover, which he should probably consider a good thing, but he has his doubts. She crosses the kitchen to the landline phone. Sure enough, a light is blinking. It was blinking this morning when he’d called Jo, but it hadn’t occurred to him to check the messages. None of them would possibly be for him. He doesn’t live here.
Without asking permission, Steph punches the button.
Alexandra’s voice comes on. “Allie? Call me. I’ve been trying to reach you. Braden, if you’re still there, and you’d better be, pick up the phone. Before I call the cops to do a welfare check.”
“You might want to call the lady,” Steph says, skipping ahead. The next message is also from Alexandra. But the one before that is, sure enough, a robocall, informing him that Allie is absent from school. Steph moves relentlessly through the missed messages. Two more from Alexandra, four from the school, and one from Lilian’s attorney, asking Braden to call to go over the will.
Steph starts to bite her lip, encounters a silver ring and starts worrying it with her tongue.
Braden looks at the clock. Just now three p.m. No reason to expect Allie early today. No reason to believe something horrible has happened, at least nothing more horrible than Ethan, who is most probably not a serial killer.
Steph slides onto one of the stools at the kitchen coffee bar. “It’s possible she’s with Ethan.”
He dials Allie’s number and it goes directly to voice mail. He sends her a text, but it just sits there, inert. No delivered or received notification.
“I told you, she’s gone incommunicado. You should put your produce away. It’s getting wilty.” Steph peers into the grocery bag and starts unpacking it. Celery. A bag of salad. The bottle of whiskey.
Her eyes meet his, assessing. Judging.
“Allie said you’re a drunk.”
“As you said, Allie doesn’t lie.”
“Except about school attendance. Apparently. Are you going to drink that?”
“I was planning on it.”
Steph shoves the bottle toward him, with enough force that he has to grab it before it slides right over the edge of the island and onto the floor. “My mom drinks. It sucks. But whatever. Your life, I guess.”
The familiar shape of the bottle in his hand promises comfort. Oblivion. Ease.
All of it a lie.
He fills his glass with water to allay temptation. “I don’t suppose you have contact info for this Ethan person.”
“He’s on Facebook, sort of.” Steph concentrates on her phone, thumbs moving at speed. “He has an account but hasn’t been on it in, like, ever.”
Braden distracts himself both from his thirst and his new worry about his daughter by putting groceries away. Steph is right about the celery, which was already limp when he bought it. The inside of the refrigerator still looks too empty when he’s done, but at least his thoughts are clearer.
“Listen, Steph. Allie’s got some major shit going on. It’s maybe not so surprising for a kid to skip school, given the circumstances.”
Steph snorts. “Were you listening to anything I’ve told you?”
“I was listening. I just think—”
“Let me tell you some things about Allie. The two most important things to her, that she would never, ever mess with, are her GPA and her music. She missed a concert. Didn’t show up. When she had the flu last year, she tried to play with a fever of one hundred and two and was pissed when they made her go home. She had a solo and everything. Mal tried to play it, but nobody plays like Allie and it sucked.”
“She hasn’t touched the cello since I’ve been here.”
“Weirder and weirder. Maybe this is one of those Mandela Effect things,” Steph says
after a minute. “Has to be. Doesn’t make any sense. Like at all.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The Mandela Effect. It’s this weird reality thing. Like—some people swear it’s Berenstain Bears and some say Berenstein. And some people believe for sure that Mandela died in prison, only others believe equally for sure that he didn’t. You see?”
All of this is too much for a reluctantly sober Braden to process. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Google it,” she says.
“Steph. Grief is a powerful force. It changes people. I suspect that’s more probable than some alternate reality theory.”
“Whatever. Allie packed that cello everywhere. There were places she wouldn’t go because it wouldn’t fit in somebody’s car. They were inseparable.”
Steph slides off the stool and onto her feet. “Give me your cell number.”
She doesn’t wait for his permission. Before he can decide whether giving her that information is going to be a good idea, she’s already tapping something into his phone, and then her own.
“There. We’re connected. Text me when she shows up. Somebody needs to worry. I guess that somebody will be me.”
Without another word, she walks out of the house, slamming the door behind her.
Braden stands there in a daze. Half an hour ago, his path was clear and simple. Open the bottle. Have a drink. Rinse. Repeat. Make dinner.
Now there’s Alexandra to call. An appointment to make with Lilian’s attorney. Worry about Allie on a whole new level.
He sends her another text message: Should I be worried? Contact me please.
And then, after pacing the length of the kitchen and living room once, twice, three times, he picks up the phone again and dials not Alexandra or the attorney or his sister but another number altogether.
Chapter Fourteen
PHEE
“Hold still!” Phee orders, meaning it.
Celestine’s tail droops at the tone of her voice and he obeys, unhappy about the water pouring over him from the handheld shower wand.
Phee turns off the water and starts lathering on the dog shampoo.
Amazing how one dead rabbit can turn an afternoon upside down. One minute, the two of them are having a lovely walk in the park, and the next, she’s face to nose with a giant and malodorous dog who could not resist rolling in the carcass.
It’s a cold, rainy day, not conducive to outdoor dog baths, and the two of them now stand in the shower: Phee naked and shivering, Celestine bedraggled, both of them unhappy.
“Next time ask me first,” Phee admonishes. “‘Is it okay if I roll in this putrid mess, mistress?’ I will tell you no and save you all of this suffering.”
She turns the water back on and begins rinsing, aware from past experience that at any moment Celestine might decide he’s had enough and make a run for it.
She’s about half done with the rinse job when the phone rings. Not just any ring, either, but the ringtone she’s assigned to Braden in the unlikely event he should ever decide to contact her. Not a call she wants to leave to the mercy of voice mail.
In an attempt to speed up the rinse cycle, she gets the wand at just the right angle so that water spurts backward and into her face, blinding her. Celestine takes advantage and bolts, taking the shower curtain with him.
Phee slams off the water, fumbles her way to a towel with one hand and the phone with the other.
“Hey, it’s Phee.”
A brief pause, and then Braden’s voice says, “I need an intervention.”
Celestine, blocked from further rampages by a closed bathroom door, shakes himself, spraying now-cold water all over Phee’s still-naked body.
“Shit!” she says.
Another pause. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
She mops her face with the towel again, tries to dry her body one-handed. “Oh, you totally should have. Bothered me. I mean, you’re not bothering me. Sorry. That was meant for my dog, not for you. Are you drinking?”
“Three minutes from it. Maybe two. Depends how long it takes to get the bottle open.”
“Where are you?”
“At the house. In the kitchen. Bottle in my hand.”
“Is it open?”
“Not yet.”
“Set it down. Walk out the door,” Phee says.
“Phee . . .”
“I mean it. Walk out the door. Do you have your keys?”
“Yes.”
“Set them down. Leave them there. Lock the door behind you.”
She hears him breathing. A door slams shut.
“Are you outside?”
“I’m thinking I should have maybe brought my jacket.”
“Oh my God. Why didn’t you?”
“Well, you didn’t say. I was following your directions.”
Phee starts laughing. She can’t help herself. This whole situation has reached the level of absurd.
“I’m not sure this is funny,” Braden says, but there’s just the barest hint of what might be laughter in his voice for all that.
“Do jumping jacks or something. Run in circles. I’m on my way.”
“You’re coming here?”
“Be there in twenty unless the canal bridge is up or the traffic is bad. Wait for me.”
“Where else would I go? It’s cold out here. The neighbors are staring.”
“Do a dance or something. They’ll think it’s performance art.”
She clicks off the phone and whirls into action. Celestine is just going to have to be rinsed enough. She towels him down as best she can and opens the bathroom door. He barrels out into the apartment, crashes into the couch, rolls on the floor. She leaves him to it. There’s nothing precious or breakable to worry about.
Her own bedraggled and besmudged appearance is more of a concern. She finishes drying herself. Runs a comb through her hair, wishes she had time for makeup, but she can’t waste time getting beautified when Braden has actually asked for her help. All the way to his house, she keeps reminding herself to breathe.
The traffic is on her side. It moves easily, no clogs. All of her lights are green. The bridge is down. Still, it seems like a lifetime before she pulls into his driveway.
He’s huddled on the porch, shivering, arms wrapped around himself for warmth. The mist has settled into his hair, his eyebrows. He unravels himself when she stops the car. Phee leans across and opens the passenger door. He sticks his head in and encounters Celestine, who has shoved his head through the opening between the seats and is growling, skeptical of this stranger.
Braden recoils.
“What on earth is that?”
“Celestine.”
“And what is a Celestine, exactly?”
Celestine’s tail is now at work, whacking against both seat and door. He snuffles at Braden, curious, no longer on alert.
Phee laughs. “Equal parts Newfoundland and random stray. He won’t hurt you. He growls when he’s happy.”
“Right. Of course. Could you have found a bigger dog, do you think? Or perhaps a bigger car?”
“Get in,” Phee says.
Braden’s eyebrows go up as he examines the interior. He’s a tall man. The seat is as far forward as it will go to make room for Celestine. It takes him a minute to fold himself into the available space. His hair brushes the ceiling liner; his knees press against the dash.
Celestine sniffs him eagerly the whole time, finishing his inspection with an approving swipe of the tongue. Braden wipes his sleeve across his face, mopping up slobber.
“Congratulations, you passed the canine test,” Phee says, shifting into reverse. “How’s the craving?”
“Ever present. If I drink, does your dog eat my heart and liver? Is that how this works?”
“You’re not going to drink.”
“Good to know.” He leans his head back and closes his eyes. His damp hair curls around his face, softening him. Phee wants to put her hand against his cheek and counts her lucky stars
that Celestine has thrust his head forward between them, blocking the impulse.
“What set you off?” she asks. She can think of about a million things, starting with the death of his wife and his son, and ending with his hands and the unplayed cello.
“It’s a long story.”
“Give me the short version. By the way, you might want to move before you are awash in dog saliva.”
He leans toward the window just in time to save his face and hair, the worst of the cascade landing on his shoulder.
“It’s Allie, mostly.”
“Not going well?”
“She hates me. For good reason. And she’s skipping school and is currently AWOL, probably with a boy.”
“Was she a sheltered type? I mean, helicopter mother and all that?”
“I wasn’t around to know, but even when she was five, she was . . . God. That kid . . .”
“What?”
“After my hands . . . before Lil kicked me out, I caught her making sandwiches for Trey because I was hungover and had slept in. She had to stand on a stool to reach the counter.” He pauses, then asks, “What kind of man lets his five-year-old cover for him?”
Phee aches for him, for Allie, with a physical bone-deep pain that feels like it will turn her inside out.
“Don’t ask me about the shit I neglected while I was drinking,” she says. “Here’s the thing, though. No more drinking now.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. Then: “What about you?”
Phee tenses, sensing dangerous questions ahead. “What about me?”
“What made you drink?”
It’s the opening she’s been waiting for, one of the things she needs to tell him, but she doesn’t take it. “Stupidity?”
As if the event that landed her in the ER with alcohol poisoning isn’t the reason why she is here with him, right now, trying to find a way to explain. Her grandfather, gone but never forgotten, has something to say about that.
“Ophelia Florence MacPhee, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Saving an alcoholic from himself. He can’t play if he’s sloshed all the time.”
“You have to talk to him.”
“Get out of my head. Go away.”
“You swore to me, Ophelia. An oath.”
Everything You Are Page 11
