by Mary McCoy
As I pulled away, I saw that her face was calm now. It had been so wild just a few minutes ago, when she was talking about killing Conrad.
He’ll never come near this family again, she’d said. She wasn’t just talking about me. Conrad had hurt all of us. He’d kidnapped my father, beaten my sister nearly to death.
But my mother didn’t know about either one of those things, so what did she mean?
That was when I heard a girl’s scream coming from down the hall, and there was only one girl it could have come from. I leaped up from the chair and darted around Annie’s bed, past Hanrahan toward the door, with my mother calling after me, “Alice, don’t—”
I didn’t hear what she said next, because I was already halfway down the hall, just in time to see Rex crashing through the stairwell door. He pushed Gabrielle along in front of him, the muzzle of his gun jammed into her back.
Walter Hanrahan was right behind me. As he ran by, he checked me with his shoulder and sent me ricocheting toward the wall before he disappeared through the stairwell after Rex and Gabrielle.
I started after them, but then Jerry was there, clapping a hand down on my shoulder.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked. “Get back in that room.”
Under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn’t have paid him the slightest heed, but back in that room was my sister. Awake. When Jerry ran down the hallway after Rex and Hanrahan, I didn’t follow him. I went back to the room in time to see Annie’s eyes, finally, blessedly open.
“Was that Gabrielle?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Don’t let them take her.”
Her voice was husky and choked-sounding, her words were slurred, but it was her. I would have jumped through a hoop of fire if she’d asked me to.
Before my mother could protest, I ran down the hall and took the stairs at the other end of the wing. Conrad was one floor up from my sister’s room. That had to be where Rex was taking Gabrielle. Conrad had been after her for days now, and I knew from firsthand experience he liked seeing girls afraid. There was no way he’d miss the chance to let her know that she hadn’t escaped from him after all.
The hallway was empty—Conrad’s stardom must have earned him a private ward. But I knew better than to think he was alone or unguarded. I stayed where I was, looking out through the tiny window in the stairwell door. There was no sign of Jerry, and I wondered if I’d been wrong and Rex and Hanrahan had taken Gabrielle down the stairs rather than up them. They couldn’t have lost him running up a single flight of stairs. But then, after a moment or two, Hanrahan emerged from one of the rooms empty-handed.
He and Rex had delivered Gabrielle straight to Conrad.
I wondered how many people were left in the room, and how many of them were armed. Conrad had a gunshot wound in his leg—if he was in there by himself. Would I be able to get Gabrielle out of there on my own? I had to get closer.
After Hanrahan reached the end of the wing and turned the corner, I unbuckled my shoes and crept down the hallway, carrying them by the straps, my back pressed against the wall. I inched closer until I came to the room next to Conrad’s, and slipped inside, hiding myself behind the door and pressing my ear to the wall. The voices were muffled, but I could still make out almost everything.
“I remember you being older.”
That was Conrad, I was sure of it. It was the same voice he’d used on me in the hills, big enough to scare you into a corner, jovial enough to deny he’d meant anything by it.
“You look like a kid, but that doesn’t mean anything. I truly could not care less.”
“I was never going to say anything, I promise.” Gabrielle’s raspy little voice had an unpleasant wheedling sound in it that I didn’t like. A begging sound.
“So then why were you chumming around with the Gates girl?”
Conrad wasn’t alone. It was another man’s voice I heard then—Rex, by the sound of it.
“I was scared. I didn’t have anyplace to go. Please, just let me go home, and I swear I’ll never tell anyone.”
“Tell anyone what? Anyway, it’s much too late for anything like that. There’s only one way to make this go away now.” His voice was gentle, honeyed, like he was trying to calm a crying infant. “I’m sorry, really I am. I just don’t see any other way.”
So placid, so sincere, as though he genuinely did feel bad about what had to be done, but really, wasn’t it a small sacrifice? Gabrielle began to cry quietly, and then there was another voice in the room with them.
When I realized who it belonged to, I squeezed the doorknob until my knuckles turned white and my fingers ached. I knew that if I didn’t hold on to something, I’d run into the next room and wrap my hands around her neck instead.
“Pull yourself together,” Ruth said. “It’s not like we’re going to kill you.”
“You’re not?” Gabrielle whimpered.
“Not if you’re a smart girl. Not if you can learn how to sing the words we tell you to.”
How could she?
How could she pretend she wanted to help my sister protect Gabrielle, then turn around and double-cross us all? That meant Ruth had been the one who’d set Annie up that night in the park. She must have led Conrad and Rex right to her. I gripped the doorknob with all my strength and bit down on the inside of my cheek to keep from screaming.
“She’s right,” Conrad said. “Ruth and I have been talking it over, and she’s got me thinking there might be another way to sort this whole thing out. So, what I’d like now is for you to go with my friends here. I’d like you to go to the police and tell them what you really saw. How Nick Gates forced you to pose for those pictures, how he took you and Irma out into the woods after that party and made you do horrible things. And that somehow, things got out of hand.”
Ruth chimed in. “And that you went to Annie because she told you that she’d help you, but instead she kept you under lock and key. That she only wanted to protect her dear daddy from what you knew.”
“And that when I brought the police to the apartment to rescue you, Nick Gates gunned them down in broad daylight,” Conrad said. “He shot me in the leg and would have finished me off if I hadn’t managed to escape.”
“Is that a story you think you can tell?” Ruth asked.
At first, there was no answer, then a choked sob, and then Gabrielle said, “Yes.”
In the end, none of it would matter. Not the pictures, not the newspapers, not Millie’s letter, two dead cops, or the word of a girl who’d seen the whole thing happen. Maybe Conrad couldn’t make those pictures of him and Annie go away, but he and Ruth could make them look like something else. I could already hear him telling the newspapers: I didn’t want to do it, but I had no choice. Annie Gates was holding that poor little girl prisoner.
And my father deserved to be punished for what he’d done, but not like this. Not while murderers like Conrad and Rex and Hanrahan went free and everything else stayed the same. The parties, the pictures, the girls, and the horrible things that happened to them—none of that would change.
I’d found Gabrielle, but it hadn’t even mattered. It would have been better if I’d never even looked.
I tried to tell myself that she was young and scared, that it wasn’t fair to blame her for this.
I tried to tell myself that. But it didn’t sit well.
Gabrielle wasn’t too young and scared to run away from home, to live on her own, to slip through Rex’s fingers time and time again. She didn’t give up when she was trapped in Conrad’s car in the middle of nowhere, Irma’s body locked in the trunk.
No, she’d made up her mind that she was going to live.
Deciding had been the easy part. She lay on her stomach across the floorboards of the Rolls-Royce, feeling half sick as Conrad chuckled to himself in the front seat.
“I haven’t forgotten about you, you know.”
Gabrielle didn’t know where they were. At first she’d tried to keep track o
f each turn, but the roads were so hilly and winding that she quickly lost track of which direction they were going in. It didn’t matter now, though. She could just get up from the floor and see for herself. Gabrielle sat down on the long leather seat next to the passenger-side door.
“It was very thoughtful of you to stay here,” Conrad said. “Not very smart, but very thoughtful.”
There was no sense in answering, so Gabrielle didn’t. Instead, she looked around for landmarks and road signs. All she could tell was that it was one of the many low, scrubby mountain ranges around the city, perpetually brown and burned-looking. She couldn’t tell them apart, especially not in the dark.
Conrad had noticed her looking out the window and said, “I wouldn’t start getting any ideas now.”
“If I thought about what I was going to do next, I knew I’d never go through with it,” Gabrielle told me as we sat huddled together in the janitor’s closet. “It was so dark I could only see right in front of us. I didn’t know whether there was a shoulder on the side of the road or a cliff.”
Don’t think, Gabrielle had told herself, and when Conrad downshifted to climb a hill, she threw open the rear suicide door. She’d heard that gangsters liked cars with doors like these for exactly this reason. It was easier to throw a body out of a moving car when the wind was holding the door open for you, not blowing it shut. Conrad slammed on the brakes just as Gabrielle tumbled out of the car and the Rolls fishtailed, then spun out as its rear wheels slid from pavement to the gravel shoulder.
“I landed in a patch of scrub near the side of the road. My shoes had blown off my feet, but other than that, I was okay. I got up and started running.”
Behind her, she heard Conrad put the car in gear and the sound of tires spinning in gravel until finally the engine roared, the car popped free, and the tires squealed as their rubber caught hold of the paved road again. Gabrielle looked back over her shoulder and saw he was gaining on her.
Conrad swerved into the wrong lane and edged alongside her, pushing her onto the shoulder where the gravel bit into her feet, and she realized what he was doing. No more than twenty yards ahead, the shoulder ended abruptly in a sheer cliff.
She turned on her heel and bolted back up the hill. As she ran, she caught a glimpse of Conrad’s face and saw that he was laughing his head off.
It was difficult for him, however, to turn the long, heavy Rolls-Royce around on a narrow mountain pass, and for a moment Gabrielle thought that she might crest the hill and get far enough ahead to lose him. Maybe there’d be a town up ahead or a wooded spot where she could hide. But in a matter of seconds, she was caught in the headlights again. It didn’t matter. She kept running. Her legs ached and her lungs felt like they were on fire, but she kept running toward whatever hopeful thing lay on the other side of the mountain.
There was no town and no place to get off the road and hide, but what Gabrielle saw when she came to the crest of the hill was no less lovely. No more than a quarter mile away, a little truck was climbing the hill from the other direction. She darted across the road and tucked herself behind a rock outcropping. A lousy hiding place, but it only had to fool Conrad long enough for him to drive past her. If he turned the Rolls-Royce around again, it might attract the driver’s attention. With his famous face and a body in his trunk, Gabrielle had to hope that he’d avoid taking chances like that.
For a moment, Gabrielle wondered whether she should flag down the driver of the truck, but decided against it. There were few good reasons to be out on a road like this at four in the morning, and fewer honest ones. What if the person behind the wheel had intentions every bit as bad as Conrad’s? And even if the driver was a farmer, carting something as innocuous as milk or produce to market, Gabrielle wasn’t sure she knew how to explain what had happened to her. There was no lie, no cover story that would account for the presence of a fourteen-year-old girl barefoot in a party dress on a narrow mountain pass at four in the morning. No story that didn’t raise more questions than it answered, or end with her being delivered to the nearest county sheriff.
Sometimes, when she was low on bus fare, she’d hitched rides from women or the occasional man, if he was especially elderly or kindly looking. They all asked a lot of questions and usually dropped her off with some sort of scolding or lecture about there being all sorts of perverts out there in the world, and did her parents know where she was?
She wouldn’t risk taking the ride. She’d walk, at least until it got light. She’d gotten away, and if she saw Conrad’s headlights coming up the road now, she’d have time to hide before he saw her. Another thought had buoyed her spirits.
“It was almost morning, and Conrad still had Irma’s body in his trunk. He could get rid of her, or he could get rid of me, but he didn’t have time to do both,” she told me.
She’d stuck to the shoulders, in the trees and brush when she could, and in her bare feet, Gabrielle began walking toward Los Angeles.
Whatever Gabrielle decided to say when Rex and Ruth took her to the police, I knew I had to forgive her. This wasn’t about being young and scared. It was about making up your mind that you were going to live. If Gabrielle told lies about Annie and my father, it was only because she had no other choice to save herself. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, but nothing about any of this was.
I huddled against the wall in the room next door to Conrad’s, fingers still clutched around the doorknob, when I heard the squeal and thunk of the hallway door closing behind Rex, Ruth, and Gabrielle. And I realized that Conrad was alone in there now. Alone, with a gunshot wound, in a hospital bed.
As I put my shoes back on, I turned over the things my mother had said the night before and the things she said a few minutes ago. I’d been trying so hard not to think about them, and I didn’t want to let them come together now.
I wouldn’t have said she made the whole thing up.
He’ll never come near this family again.
I wouldn’t have cared how it made the studio look.
Finding out the truth is like solving a puzzle. You snap the last piece into place, crack the last letter in the code, and you feel a surge of gratification at finally unlocking some secret unknown.
That’s not what this felt like.
At last, I knew why Annie left. I understood why she’d risked everything to protect Gabrielle, why she’d dared to involve the police.
Knowing didn’t make me feel better. It didn’t give me any relief or satisfaction. All it gave me was another awful thing to carry around in my heart.
Only this wasn’t about me. It was about justice for Irma and Gabrielle, but it was about something else, too.
It was about a father who betrayed his older daughter, a mother who wrapped her up in evening gowns and sent her out to sing for a room full of wolves.
And one night four years ago, Conrad Donahue had been one of them.
I wondered whether he’d started off trying to charm her, or whether he’d cornered her in a dressing room; whether the other men at the party had known what had happened or not; whether my father’s first impulse had been to save his daughter, or his movie star. When my mother said she’d kill Conrad Donahue, she meant it. Now I felt the same way.
I looked around the room for something that I could use as a weapon, but there was nothing sharper or heavier than a bedpan. I wondered if I’d be able to do it with my bare hands, strangle him or hold a pillow down over his face until he was dead.
At that moment, I felt like I probably could.
I wasn’t thinking straight—every sensible thought in my head was consumed by white-hot rage as I crawled out from behind the door and into the hallway, rehearsing in my mind how I’d do it. I’d climb up on the bed and pin his arms down with my knees, and I’d smother him. I thought about the story Gabrielle had told me, how he’d drowned Irma for less than no reason; I thought about what he’d done to Annie. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that the world would be a better place without Conrad Dona
hue in it.
I didn’t think about whether I was physically strong enough or whether I’d be able to go through with it. I didn’t think about what I’d do after it was over. All I could think was that Conrad Donahue was going to get away with everything unless I did this.
The problem was, every time I steeled myself to leap out of my sprinter’s stance and run into Conrad’s room, the faces of people I knew, people who cared about me, began to swim up before my eyes. I could see Cy telling me he wanted to see me again, my mother asking me to promise I’d be careful. I could hear Cassie’s voice saying, Don’t make me sorry I helped you, Alice, and Jerry asking, Do you think Annie would want you mixed up in any of this?
I was in no shape to listen to reason or conscience or Jerry Shaffer, and I certainly wasn’t listening for Ruth. The shoes she wore were flat with rubber soles, ugly, sensible, and quiet. But not silent. I should have heard her doubling back down the hall, would have heard her had I not been crawling on my hands and knees down a hospital hallway, revenge seething in my brain.
With a single swift motion, she lifted me up by the elbow with one hand and covered my mouth with the other, then marched me down the hallway. Only when we were through the door did she let me speak.
“Where’s Gabrielle?” I asked, gasping for breath.
“She’s in the car with Rex.” My face must have indicated what an insane idea I thought this was because Ruth waved me off and said, “He’s not going to lay a finger on her.”
Then I remembered. Of course he wouldn’t—not now. Conrad had just sent the three of them off to the police station so Gabrielle could tell everyone about the terrible things Annie and my father had done to her.
