The Weight of Silence
Page 1
PRAISE FOR GREGG OLSEN
THE LAST THING SHE EVER DID
“Gregg Olsen pens brilliant, creepy, page-turning, heart-pounding novels of suspense that always keep me up at night. In The Last Thing She Ever Did, he topped himself.”
—Allison Brennan, New York Times bestselling author
“Beguiling, wicked, and taut with suspense and paranoia, The Last Thing She Ever Did delivers scenes as devastating as any I’ve ever read with a startling, pitch-perfect finale. A reminder that evil may reside in one’s actions, but tragedy often spawns from one’s inaction.”
—Eric Rickstad, New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Girls
“Olsen’s latest examines how a terrible, split-second decision has lingering effects, and the past echoes the present. Full of unexpected twists, The Last Thing She Ever Did will keep you guessing to the last line.”
—J. T. Ellison, New York Times bestselling author of Lie to Me
“Master storyteller Gregg Olsen continues to take readers hostage with another spellbinding tale of relentless, pulse-pounding suspense.”
—Rick Mofina, international bestselling author of Last Seen
“Tense. Well-crafted. Gripping.”
—Mary Burton, New York Times bestselling author
“With The Last Thing She Ever Did, Gregg Olsen delivers an edgy, tension-filled, roller-coaster ride of a novel that will thrill and devastate in equal measure.”
—Linda Castillo, New York Times bestselling author
ALSO BY GREGG OLSEN
FICTION
The Last Thing She Ever Did
The Sound of Rain
Just Try to Stop Me
Now That She’s Gone
The Girl in the Woods
The Girl on the Run
Shocking True Story
Fear Collector
Betrayal
The Bone Box
Envy
Closer Than Blood
Victim Six
Heart of Ice
A Wicked Snow
A Cold Dark Place
NONFICTION
A Killing in Amish Country: Sex, Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Murder
A Twisted Faith: A Minister’s Obsession and the Murder That Destroyed a Church
The Deep Dark: Disaster and Redemption in America’s Richest Silver Mine
Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest
Cruel Deception: A Mother’s Deadly Game, a Prosecutor’s Crusade for Justice
If Loving You Is Wrong: The Shocking True Story of Mary Kay Letourneau
Abandoned Prayers: The Incredible True Story of Murder, Obsession, and Amish Secrets
Bitter Almonds: The True Story of Mothers, Daughters, and the Seattle Cyanide Murders
Bitch on Wheels: The True Story of Black Widow Killer Sharon Nelson
If I Can’t Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Gregg Olsen
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503901353
ISBN-10: 1503901351
Cover design by Damon Freeman
For Lindsay Jackman, who proves every single day that her superpower is her smile
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
THIRTEEN DAYS EARLIER
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
We are the bats.
We hang upside down like the undulating colony of flying rodents we observed as kids when our parents took us to Carlsbad Caverns. It was the summer the year before our mom left us for Hollywood. Stacy and I wore Hypercolor T-shirts that turned from pink to purple with the heat of the New Mexican day.
That was a long time ago. A lifetime ago. And yet a happy memory crosses my mind in the space of a tragedy. Or something even darker.
Right now my sister’s blouse is no longer white but red. I twist as much as possible, suspended by the shoulder harness of my seat belt. I can’t see Stacy’s face. I can’t really hear her. My breathing is shallow, and I feel every rib as my battered chest contracts. It is the only thing I can feel. My legs are immobile, and a spike of fear goes through my numbness: Am I paralyzed? Am I dead? The car’s engine grinds as it struggles to keep running, though I know the wheels are spinning in the night air that now hangs over our feet. I manage to turn off the engine, and as it finally dies, I hear the Pacific Ocean striking the coastline like a mallet somewhere below where my Accord skidded to a stop.
“Stacy?” I ask.
No response.
“Are you all right?”
Again no answer.
I still can’t see her, but something tells me that she’s alive. The space is small, compacted by the crash, and I can feel my little sister’s presence. Stacy has an aura that is thick and impenetrable, a force field that neither I nor anyone who knows her can deny. Some call it charisma. What Stacy has, I think, is more like the disposition of a vicious pet. It would come at you, sometimes unexpectedly, when she wanted to turn it on. It filled the room and forced out all the air. No one could be a match for that. As this goes through my mind, I think of my mother and how she wanted to be a star. How she’d ladled the love on her favorite daughter, only to turn on her later in life. Mom was jealous of Stacy. Stacy had that thing that celebrities, CEOs, and politicians hav
e. It’s an intrinsic power that can never be manufactured. It just is.
“Stacy,” I repeat. “We’ll get out of this. Hold on. It will be okay.”
Even in that flash, I know that I’ve offered comfort to the devil. And yet I cannot help myself. No matter what Stacy is or what she’s done, I love her. She’s a virus. A disease. I’ve prayed to God all of my adult life that I’d be able to push aside our frayed but tragically elastic bond and just say goodbye to her once and for all. I’d never see her again. I’d lie to myself that there were more good times with her than bad and that I missed her every single day. In time, I might even be able to believe my own deceits. I could tell her daughter that she was a wonderful sister and mother. Emma would live the rest of her life thinking that Stacy Sonntag Chase was as beautiful on the inside as she had been on the outside. Not a hideous orange cream from the second layer of a Whitman’s Sampler but a silky chocolate truffle from Godiva.
I have to get out of here. Emma needs me. My dad needs me. Carter will miss me.
I push against the ceiling with a bloody hand. It’s littered with glass, rhinestones come to mind for some reason. I feel my feet, and a sigh of relief pours over me. I am not paralyzed. My legs could be broken, but I am not going to end up in a wheelchair. I amend my thoughts. I am going to live. I’m going to get both of us out of here.
“Stacy?” I ask again. My voice is froggy, and saying her name hurts. “Damn it, Stacy, you need to answer me!”
Finally her Staciness comes at me. I feel her presence. A gasp comes forth, then her favorite and most meaningless phrase. “I’m sorry, Nicole. I’m really sorry. I am. You have to believe me.”
She’s such a liar.
“I know,” I say. “I know.”
My breathing halts as I see her. She’s battered from the accident. The skin on her face is lacerated to such a degree that I cannot mask my own horror.
“It’s bad,” she tells me, looking over with those beautiful eyes of hers.
Her eyes are red, white, and blue. Patriotic, I think. Go USA! America the beautiful.
“It will be all right,” I say.
She touches her cheek, and a rivulet of blood winds down her arm. She gasps again. I’m not sure if it’s because of the blood or the realization that she’s never going to be the same. No surgeon will be able to fix what’s become of her undeniable perfection. Her beauty has been eclipsed by a rollover accident.
“I’m going to be all right,” she tells me. It’s a hope. A prayer.
“You will be fine,” I tell her.
My free hand finds my seat belt, and I undo the buckle, and suddenly I’m on the ceiling, bunched up like a bloody spitball. I can’t remember if the driver’s-side window was rolled down before the crash or if it is the source of some of the rhinestones. It’s gone. As I slither out of my car, I feel every inch of my body. Every nerve is on fire. I think I’m crying, but I’m not sure about that. Glass falls out of my hair, and blood rains down everywhere. My blood. My red.
My sister is calling out. She’s telling me to get her out. I right myself on the gravel of the narrow shoulder of the highway. A warm wind blows over me, but it’s a silent breeze. All around me spruce and fir trees cower from the often-turbulent Pacific. So peaceful now, I think. I stand above the wreckage and look over the ocean. Off in the distance is a ship loaded with containers carrying cars, TVs, clothing from Asia. It’s a wall across the vast horizon, spotlighted by the moon.
Stacy and I have a wall between us too. It’s my car. She’s on the other side. She’s crying and begging for me to come.
I just stay still, frozen.
THIRTEEN DAYS EARLIER
CHAPTER ONE
Tuesday, August 15
It’s a little after 4:00 p.m. on the hottest day of the summer—in striking distance of triple digits. A Subaru Forester stops hard in the parking lot adjacent to the Starbucks. The driver, a young man in his twenties, gets out, yanks at the rear passenger door handle, and swings it open with an abruptness that nearly unhinges the door from the midsize SUV’s frame.
He struggles to pull a baby from a rear-facing car seat and yells so loudly that a woman coming out of the coffee store drops her Frappuccino. The cold and creamy drink splashes upward and covers her bare legs. She lets out a scream.
“What have I done?” the man calls out, lowering himself to the sticky-hot asphalt.
The woman, heading home after her shift at the Wendy’s next door, forgets her drink disaster and runs over to the Subaru.
“Oh my God!” she says. “Call 911!”
“What have I done?” he yells again as he bends over the child.
The woman, Jordan Conway, asks the man if he knows CPR.
He shakes his head.
She’s rattled, but she pushes him aside and unbuckles the child from the car seat. The little girl is wearing pink shorts and a white top with the appliqué of an elephant. On her feet are tiny white saltwater sandals. But she is still, her skin pallid, with areas of blue and pink. Her blue eyes are fixed.
Jordan took CPR for her job at her father’s Wendy’s but never used it on anyone but a practice dummy. The certificate she earned was tucked inside a memory album that she planned on assembling one day. As she hovers over the baby, she recalls how she’d been taught to blow into both the nose and mouth of an infant.
That afternoon, when duty calls, Jordan leans in and gasps. She is nearly overcome by the stench coming from inside the car. It is an odor she’s never smelled in her life.
It is the hottest day of the year. In minutes the Frappuccino she dropped transforms itself from liquid to sticky goo.
“Save her!” the man yells as a growing circle of onlookers converges around the car. “This is fucking all my fault!”
Seconds later, the sound of sirens cuts through the drama, and the crowd parts. Jordan, feeling a combination of nausea, fear, and an emotion she can’t pinpoint, gives up. Tears flooding her eyes, she steps aside so paramedics can save the little girl.
“I forgot she was in the car,” the man says. “I fucking forgot. Now look what I’ve done. I’ve lost her. Goddammit!”
More sirens scream. More people arrive at the scene, the saddest Jordan Conway and the others gathered there have ever witnessed.
CHAPTER TWO
Tuesday, August 15
My father’s eyes are blue like my sister’s. I know that he can hear every word I say, but it is late in the afternoon, and lucidity fades with the heat and duration of the day. He sits in a wheelchair facing the window that looks out over a courtyard planted with wilted red and yellow roses, a gift from a woman’s family after she passed. Next to him are two men playing checkers without the benefit of a game board. Just plastic disks that they move around without any real rhyme or reason.
“Are you hungry, Dad?” I ask.
He doesn’t respond.
I put my hand on his shoulder, feeling knobs of bone under his paper skin.
“Supper smells good,” I say, though it is a lie. Nothing at Ocean View really smells good. That’s not to say that it isn’t clean. It is. The staff appears to care, though I cannot be sure if their alertness and regard for my father and the other patients is the result of compassion or excellent corporate training.
It is probably worth what we pay to ensure that he’s in a better place than Medicaid would put him. It crosses my mind just then that my dad may outlive my resources. Alzheimer’s is not only the cruelest of diseases; it is also one that lingers longest after its diagnosis. It steals the memories of those afflicted while creating hideous, painful, and depressive new ones for those left out of the fog.
“You’re a good girl, Stacy,” he says, finally looking at me with those storm cloud–blue eyes of his.
“I’m Nicole,” I say.
I’m the good one, I think. Stacy’s not only a bitch, but she’s worse than you can imagine.
If you could imagine.
“You always were my favorite,” h
e says.
I give up. We’ve done this a thousand times. I want to remind him that I’m the one who brought him to Ocean View. I’m the one who stops in on my way home whenever I’m not in the midst of a homicide investigation. I’m the one who tells the staff that the errant whiskers on his Adam’s apple would drive my father to drink. If he noticed them, that is.
Which he doesn’t.
I do.
Dad stirs a little. He’s wearing gray sweatpants and a clean white T-shirt. I made a face when I saw him that morning. I want my father dressed as though he’s still living a life. I don’t want to see him looking as if he’s ready for bed every beat of the day.
Even when I know he is.
“Dad,” I say, “I’m going to take you to the bistro now.” I’m using the euphuism that Ocean View employees use, the vernacular of the upscale. Rooms are called suites. The dayroom is called the lounge. The cafeteria is the bistro. The clientele that fall for the naming convention are those like my father. The more alert and with-it residents—those who might have physical challenges and not mental ones—recognize that it’s merely a marketing technique. Most of those live in the north wing and dread the day that, like my dad, they are required to move south.
One of his feet has slipped from the stirrups of his wheelchair, and I kneel down to put it back. His nails are yellow and cracked, and his feet are a road map of broken blood vessels and capillaries that have exploded under his tissue-thin skin. I feel his knotted hand roll over the top of my head. It’s a gentle swipe. I know it’s meant in recognition for my help, not to shoo me away.
“You’re a good girl, Stacy,” he says once more. His hand drops, and I set it in his lap. When I was a girl, I wanted nothing more than to have my father think of me as his favorite. I wanted nothing more than his love, his approval. When our mother left us, it was me who did everything I could think of to hold us together. I cleaned the house. Mowed the lawn. I threw away the empty gin bottles by his bedside without even saying that I’d found them. When Stacy needed something for school, a hobby, or even a date, I was the one who made sure she had it. Layaway at the Aberdeen Penney’s and a part-time job at Burger King after school fueled my sense of duty. I did all of it with an open heart too. Seriously. I just knew that my sister and my dad needed me—more than I needed anything for myself. The funny thing I learned about giving is that sometimes the more you give, the more recipients demand. It’s like carbo-loading for a marathon. You eat for a purpose, but you find that you want it even more after the race is over.