He opened his eyes wide, opened his mouth to refute her. “I told you, I didn’t do anything—”
“Oh, it wasn’t you.” Jo leaned forward. “It wasn’t you. But you weren’t any less terrified, because she had the dress with the semen. She had DNA. She had leverage, and you were afraid she’d use it. So you stole the dress, but you forgot something equally damning.” She whispered, “She had a pair of underwear with her blood from the rape and your father’s semen.”
Trey sucked in his cheeks. His hands came back on the table, palming it. “I went to wake her up,” he murmured. “I wanted to take her home, but Dad was in there.”
“They hadn’t flown out that day, had they?”
“No. The weather was bad in Alexandria. They were canceling flights and rerouting, so Dad and John came home from the airport during the party.” Trey wet his lips. “My father . . . he hasn’t been the same since my mom died. None of us have.”
Jo opened the folder, shuffled a page and then began to read aloud:
“‘No one made you drink. No one made you pass out. He was drunk, too. You should not have worn a dress that tight. What was he supposed to think? It’s your word against ours. Do not mess with us. Let it drop, or your life will be over.’”
She paused so she could look at him, see into his eyes. If they were the windows to his soul, they were full of splintered cracks, about to shatter.
Then she read a little more: “‘You don’t have proof, so don’t lie. The blue dress is smoke. You have nothing. You know about my posse? Leave JR alone. Shut your trap. Or we’ll take you to Celina.’”
Trey ran his fingers through his hair, making little choking noises. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I had to protect him.”
“You stole her dress. Did you take it to the bonfire and burn it?”
He pursed his lips.
“You protected a rapist,” Jo said, the thought piercing her heart. “What about Kelly, huh? She was a victim.”
Who protected her? Who looked out for Kelly? Jo asked herself, though she knew the answer.
No one.
She closed the folder, clasping her hands atop it to mask their trembling. “You put her panties on backward, and you pulled her dress back down before you loaded her into your car and took her home. When she got in touch later, did she turn the screws? Maybe ask for more than you’d bargained for? So you threatened her. For all I know, you lied to her, told her there was a video or photo, something out there that she’d be humiliated for all the world to see, pushing her closer to the edge.” Jo’s jaw clenched. “We’ll get your phone, Trey, and we’ll get your father’s, too. Pretty soon, we’ll know everything that happened. We’ll have the truth, and you won’t be able to squirm out of it.”
He turned red-faced, his body shaking. He wrapped his arms around himself, but it did little to still him.
“Your dad raped a fifteen-year-old girl, then you victimized her all over again. Did that make you feel good? Did you feel like a bigger man?”
“No! God, no,” he blurted out through snot and tears and abject fear for himself and his future and everything he had to lose.
He hung his head, hands holding on to it, as if to keep it down. And as he fell apart, he started talking, angrily telling Jo that nothing was the same after his mother got sick. His father turned to other women and booze, spending money like water and traveling, leaving him and John to deal with it, trying to fill a void that his sons couldn’t fill.
Jo didn’t interject. She just listened, wanting to feel even a sliver of pity for a family torn apart by loss. But what the Eldons had done was inexcusable. They had broken the already fragile soul of an innocent girl, and no amount of explanations or apologies would ever make up for that.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
It was midnight before Jo could leave the station.
She was beyond tired, beyond hungry. Her insides felt like they’d been ripped out and wrung out. All she could think of was getting home, crawling into bed, and holding Adam. She wanted to pull the covers over her head and forget all the things she’d seen today, all the horrible things she’d learned.
But as she passed the server room, heading toward the rear exit, she saw a light and stuck her head in, just to be sure that Bridget had gone. But she hadn’t.
“Hey,” Jo called out. “You should be home asleep.”
The dark head turned around. “I couldn’t sleep if I wanted to,” she said. “I was hoping to see you, but I had to wait for the circus to die down.”
Jo gave her a weary smile. “You can ease up now,” she said, “and get back to working on other cases. This one’s as good as closed.”
The wide brown eyes behind the thick lenses just stared at her, like she hadn’t heard a word. She didn’t have her headphones on, didn’t seem to notice the noise or anything else around her. The young woman looked pained.
“Bridget?” Jo’s smile went away.
“It isn’t over, Detective Larsen,” she said. “It’s not closed, not yet. I found more saved screenshots of messages that Kelly had stashed away . . .”
Jo waved her off. “We’re getting subpoenas for all the Posse’s phones and their computers. Trey and his father will have to produce the key for the encryption. We’ll have all we need to press charges.”
“No,” Bridget said staunchly. “It’s not even e-mails. This has nothing to do with the Posse or the party. But it might help explain why.”
“Why what?”
“Why she killed herself. Isn’t that what this was really all about?”
She moved her chair aside so Jo could see what was on her three monitors, a triptych of text messages blown up so large, even the captain wouldn’t need his spectacles to read. And every word, every phrase made Jo’s heart ache:
You’re a slut
You’re worthless
You’re a liar
You deserve what you got
No one wants you
No one loves you
You’ve got no dad, and your mom’s barely got time for you
Go fucking kill yourself
Go jump from the tower and be done with it
No one will miss you
No one will care that you’re gone
It was worse than the stuff posted by Barbara Amster as Angel. And it wasn’t even from Trey or his boys.
“Brutal, huh?” Bridget said in a sad little whisper.
“Yeah, brutal,” Jo agreed. The worst part of all was that the texts were from Kelly’s BFF, someone she’d grown up with and loved like a sister.
Cassie Marks.
Jo was up bright and early the next morning, despite hardly having slept.
She called the high school as soon as it opened and asked Helen Billings for her help again.
By the time the first bell had rung, she was waiting for Cassie in the conference room, where just days ago, Cassie had spilled the beans about Trey Eldon’s party and the night that had changed Kelly forever.
Except that wasn’t the whole story, just the part that she’d cared to share.
No wonder the girl had been so interested in whether or not they’d found Kelly’s phone and so insistent that they let Kelly rest in peace.
“Maybe it’s better, you know, not to dig too deep. Maybe you should just drop it.”
Jo heard the tap-tap-tap of approaching footsteps before the door opened, and Cassie Marks stood there, hesitating.
“Come in, please,” Jo told her.
Cassie took her time. She nibbled on her glossy lips and turned to close the door. She walked toward the table slowly, to the place where Jo had spread out the copies of the text conversations where Cassie had methodically beaten down Kelly.
She didn’t sit but stood there, staring at the pages. She stopped gnawing on her lips. Instead, her mouth began to tremble.
“I loved her,” she said and began to cry, fat little teardrops sliding from her eyes. “I loved her, and she was leaving me behind. She wanted to
move up, but she didn’t want to take me with her. I was hurt, so I lashed out. But I didn’t mean it.”
Jo didn’t believe that for a moment. Cassie had meant to destroy Kelly, and she had done a damned good job.
“She wanted you to go to the party, too,” Jo told her, having heard it from Trey himself. “She asked Trey to invite you. He said no. It wasn’t Kelly’s fault that you were excluded.”
“You’re lying!” Cassie’s eyes flashed, angry and accusing. She didn’t even bother to wipe at the bubbles of snot that snorted from her nose. “Kelly told me I couldn’t go with her. She never mentioned Trey—”
“She was trying to be kind, to spare your feelings,” Jo said, wondering if it would sink in, if Cassie would realize what she’d done.
“No,” the girl insisted. “No, she wasn’t trying to spare me. She thought I wasn’t good enough.”
Good God.
“You’re the one who cut the bracelet off,” Jo reminded her. “You cut her off when she needed you. She was raped, and you flat-out didn’t care. You left her to deal with the aftermath on her own.”
“That’s not true!”
“You broke her heart—”
“She broke mine!”
Cassie grabbed the pages off the table and tore them up, threw them onto the floor and headed for the door, but Jo sprang up from the chair, catching her arm.
“Do you know what you did to her?” she asked, getting right in Cassie’s blotchy face. “Do you even understand?”
“I didn’t push her! She jumped.”
Jo made a noise of disgust. “You might not have been there that night, but you walked her to the edge with your words. You might as well have thrown her over.”
“I didn’t mean for her to die!” Cassie bawled. “I just wanted her to feel as bad as I did, to feel as alone.”
“Well, you did a bang-up job.”
Jo watched her fall apart. The tears coming faster. Did she get it now? Had the truth sunk in? Was she grasping the fact that she had not been betrayed, that she was the one who’d done the betraying?
Jo wanted to feel sorry for her, but she couldn’t. Kelly was the one who’d suffered. Kelly was the one who’d needed compassion. But she hadn’t found it anywhere, not in her best friend, not in her mother. Certainly not with the Eldons.
“The girl is dead. Kelly’s dead. She offed herself, and that’s all there is to it. Nobody pushed her. Nobody made her jump. So get off my back, keep away from my bros, and leave my family the hell alone.”
Jo couldn’t decide which offense was worse—that Kelly had been raped by a grown man she’d known and trusted, or that she’d been goaded to her death by a girl she’d considered family.
It wasn’t possible to pick one, to weigh one evil against another. Each was horrific in its own right. Both had caused a girl to die.
She couldn’t bring Kelly back. She couldn’t tell her that everything would be all right, that she just had to hang in there long enough to see that her life wasn’t over. Jo could only do her job. She could only pick up the pieces victims left behind and make sure that all the guilty parties paid a price.
Even if that price was never high enough.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Monday morning, a week later
The woman looked a lot like Mama: thin white hair cut at her chin, the baby-fine strands revealing plenty of her pink scalp; pale skin that hung loosely at her jawline and neck; blond-lashed blue eyes ringed with puffy, brown shadows. Eyes so bright but so vacant, like the lights were on but nobody was home.
“I knew Verna back before you were born,” she said as she came to settle in the chair beside Jo’s mother at the dining room table. “Your mama was such a pretty girl. Rather like a southern Grace Kelly.” She sounded deceptively lucid, something Jo was sure she wasn’t, or she wouldn’t have been at Winghaven, not on the dementia floor, where nobody but the staff had all their marbles. “We were stewardesses with TWA for years and years, and your mama loved to travel. It hit her hard when her folks died, and she went home for a while to take care of things.”
Mama was a stewardess? Jo mused, because it wasn’t a story she’d ever heard. She didn’t know much about Mama’s life before she’d met Daddy, and almost as little about the time before Daddy left.
“I don’t think I saw her again until we ran into each other at Neiman Marcus years and years later. She was working the cosmetics counter, and I was there to buy lipstick. I always did like Le Rouge. Was that Chanel? No, no, it was Yves Saint Laurent.” The woman paused and smiled. “Such a pretty red, don’t you think? I never leave home without it.”
But she had no lipstick on. Just pale pink skin, slightly chapped.
“Your mama, she was in the circus once,” the woman went on. “She trained elephants.”
“Ah,” Jo murmured, realizing then that the woman might not even have known Mama at all. She turned away from the stranger, looking at Verna, whose rheumy eyes seemed to be staring far away, at something Jo couldn’t see because it probably wasn’t there.
“Mama?” She touched the blue-veined hand. “Do you want something to drink? It’s about time for lunch, but I could find you some lemonade, I’ll bet.”
They always had lemonade. And ice cream, too.
Verna reached a hand in the air. “Do you see it?” she said. “There’s a bird on the branch there. It’s so little.”
But Jo saw only an empty hallway, a potted plant, and the shiny doors of a closed elevator. Instead of correcting her, she nodded. “Sure, I see it. Very pretty.”
Mama smiled. “I love birds,” she said. “They come visit me.”
Jo sighed, glancing up at the clock on the wall. She’d been there for only fifteen minutes, and it felt like an eternity.
“I knew your father,” the woman in the opposite chair went on, and Jo settled back, turning to look at her again.
“Is that so?”
“Oh, yes. Handsome man,” the woman remarked, blue eyes glinting. “Very quiet, though.”
“Ah.”
“They didn’t approve of him, you know,” she said, and Jo wrinkled her brow.
“Who?”
“Your mother’s parents. They didn’t like him one little bit.”
Jo swallowed, reminding herself the woman didn’t know what she was saying. It was like Mama seeing a bird where there was none. The past didn’t exist for these folks anymore, not in a true sense. Memories got jumbled up with fiction.
Except there was a sliver of truth in those words. Mama had confessed once, when she’d been too drunk to censor herself, that her folks had not approved of Jo’s father, that they’d cut her off when they’d found out she’d gotten herself knocked up. Jo had never heard exactly why. She had always assumed it was because Mama and Daddy hadn’t been married when she’d been conceived, and Verna’s parents had been ultraconservative and uptight.
Jo had not even started kindergarten when her dad left them, divorcing Verna. She had barely known him, not enough to remember much. She had never known her grandparents on either side. Mama had claimed they were all dead whenever she’d asked.
A part of her wondered now if any of that had been true, or if Mama had just made it up to suit herself. Jo looked at Verna now, staring at things that weren’t real, and she wasn’t sure if she’d ever know anything for sure.
“I remember seeing Verna with him once, though she tried to pretend he wasn’t her beau,” the woman went on, clicking her tongue against yellow teeth. “He had very dark eyes and dark hair, much like yours. He kept it short, of course. He had to, so no one would know.” The loose skin at her jaw wobbled as she nodded in Jo’s direction.
Know what? Jo nearly asked but didn’t. She was getting tired of this game. She was ready to go.
She glanced at Mama, who wasn’t paying any mind to the woman. She had been particularly withdrawn since she’d returned from the psych ward at Presbyterian. She hadn’t said much, except to comment on the invis
ible bird. Jo almost missed the usual babble that made no sense. If they’d put her on some kind of medication to keep her calm, afraid that she’d push a resident again, Jo hadn’t been told, and she didn’t ask.
Her white hair was carefully brushed away from her brow and pulled into a ponytail. One of the caretakers, a young woman named Egypt, said Mama had been grabbing the strands that fell into her eyes and yanking them out.
“I believe your father was a boxer,” the garrulous woman went on. “He was very famous. He had a funny foreign name that’s on the tip of my tongue . . .”
Good God.
“Excuse me,” Jo said, having heard about enough. “But I don’t even know you.”
The woman laughed, a soft cackle that made Jo think of a fairy-tale witch, something she vaguely resembled. “Everyone knows me,” she answered. “I’m Irma.”
“Of course you are,” Jo said, angling her chair so her back was mostly to the woman, trying not to be rude, but she was tired of hearing her nonsensical stories that only reminded Jo of how much she did not know about her own past.
The woman reached over to stroke Verna’s brown-speckled arm. “Oh, Lord, I am so happy to have found such an old friend here,” she remarked. “She’s going to take care of me, you know. She said she’d drive me wherever I needed to go. Isn’t that sweet?”
“Very,” Jo said dryly. Sweet and impossible, since Mama hadn’t had a car to drive for longer than she’d had Alzheimer’s.
Jo checked the clock again. Noon on the button.
“Ladies, it’s lunchtime,” a staffer trilled, walking over and interrupting the very one-sided conversation.
She had on the bright blue shirt with a dove on the left pocket that all the employees at Winghaven wore. Jo had been told the color was supposed to be calming, but she didn’t feel calm. She felt like a trapped bird, ready to flee.
“Irma, are you dining with Verna again today? How great,” the caretaker said, doing her best to smile and play perky. She turned to Jo. “Will you be staying for lunch?”
“No,” Jo said, when she really meant, hell, no.
Walk a Crooked Line (Jo Larsen Book 2) Page 24
