After She's Gone

by Lisa Jackson

  Cassie felt as if her world had just turned upside down. Everything she’d known, everything she’d believed was no longer sturdy and true. It was as if her past, that which had molded her, was no longer set in concrete but more like emotional quicksand. She had a half sister? An older half-sister she’d never met, never known existed? Dark thoughts swirled in her mind as she began to consider all the implications. “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “Because I had the baby at St. Mary’s Hospital.” She cleared her throat. “That hospital, St. Mary’s? It’s now Mercy.”

  “What?” Cassie whispered, thinking of her own experience recently. Dear God, she’d been a patient in the same hospital where her mother had birthed a secret baby thirty-odd years earlier? What were the chances of that?

  A tear had started to roll down Jenna’s cheek and she sniffed. “When you checked yourself in there, all these old memories returned and I even thought about telling you then, but Allie was missing and you . . . you were struggling.” Her back stiffened as she brushed the offensive tear away. “I didn’t think it was the time to bring up that I had another child, one I didn’t raise.” She sniffed. Guilt wracked her features. “I . . . I guess there never was a good time. I . . . oh, dear God. I made so many mistakes. First I was ashamed, but I finished school and drifted to California, where I met your father and got into films and . . . there just wasn’t a time to come up with the truth. I was afraid of the press, of what it would do to my career and then, of course, to you and Allie. What it would do to you to know that I’d abandoned my first child.”

  “Shhh. You did the right thing,” Carter said.

  “Did I? Who knows?” Her eyes were wide. Guilt-riddled. “I should have at least put my name on some kind of registry so that she could have found me, could have gotten in touch, but”—Jenna was shaking her head—“of course I didn’t. I thought it would be best and maybe someday I’d get in touch with her, but then I became this . . . this thing in Hollywood and I thought it would be best not to say anything.” Her expression evolved to regret. “As I said, no one knew, and I felt that the child didn’t need to be subjected to the spotlight of being Jenna Hughes’s ‘secret baby’ or ‘love child’ or whatever name and stigma would be thrown her way. She needed to grow up in a normal family, with loving parents, a mother and a father who cared about her.” Jenna’s voice cracked and her drink wobbled in her hands.

  Stern-faced, Shane took the glass and set it on the counter, then wrapped an arm over her shoulders. “Shhh,” he whispered again, kissing the top of her head. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “Okay?” Cassie repeated, disbelieving. “Are you nuts? How can you even suggest that everything’s going to be okay? This . . . this is crazy. I mean, everything I thought I knew about you,” she said to her mother, “—and Dad . . . all of it was built on a lie.”

  “Hey!” Carter said.

  But Jenna’s eyes reflected her own doubts.

  In a chilling moment of realization, Cassie realized where this was going.

  The masks!

  A new fear strangled her as she saw, in her mind’s eye, the hastily scribbled messages scrawled across the back of each: sister. mother. Her heart stilled and she dreaded what was to come. “You think it’s her? The one who left the masks . . . who killed Holly and Brandi?” she whispered, the horror within her growing.

  Jenna was nodding, the tears streaming now. “I can’t be certain, of course, and I pray to God that I’m wrong, but . . .” Her voice faded and for a second Cassie was sure that her mother was going to collapse. “. . . it could be my daughter found out that she was mine and that she’s mentally unstable and . . .”

  “And a murderess?” Cassie whispered, her mind spinning to differing horrendous scenarios. “That she’s leaving the masks to get back at you? At me? At Allie?” Her insides turned to ice as she considered the horrifying possibilities. “Oh, God, do you think she’s held Allie somewhere or . . . or maybe even—”

  “Oh, hey, whoa!” Trent cut in, holding up his hands, stopping the direction of the conversation. “We’re all making some pretty big leaps here.” He eyed Carter and Jenna. “We don’t know anything. This is all just supposition.”

  “Yeah.” Carter gave his wife a squeeze. “We know, but it’s certainly a lead the police need to explore.” His eyes narrowed as he said, “I’ve called the Portland PD. It seems Nash was already on the same wavelength, going at the idea from a different angle. Jenna supplied Nash with as much information as she has, date of birth, name of the lawyer who was involved, hospital, which they already knew. That seems to be the connection of Belva Nelson, the nurse you saw in the hospital room. She really did work there. At St. Mary’s. She was in the delivery room.”

  Stunned, Cassie stared at her mother in disbelief. “But why would she come back to visit me?” She envisioned the nurse in the white uniform. “To tell me about Allie? How would she know that she was okay?”

  “I don’t know,” Jenna said darkly.

  “Have they tracked down this nurse, this Belva person?” Cassie asked, her mind spinning with dozens of questions. “Does she know where Allie is? What happened to her? Why hasn’t she called or shown up?” For a fleeting second, Cassie’s heart took flight with hope. Finally there would be answers. Allie would return! This whole mess and mystery would be behind them.

  Jenna was shaking her head and Carter said, “No one knows what happened. And Belva Nelson is missing.”

  “Missing?” Trent cut in and Carter gave them a brief rundown of Belva Nelson’s connection to Sonja Watson and the fact that the retired nurse was now MIA.

  “What happened to her?” Cassie demanded.

  “Don’t know. But the police will find out. They’re double-checking with her family.”

  So it wasn’t over.

  And Allie was still missing.

  “I wanted you to know,” Jenna said. “Before you heard it somewhere else.”

  “Like where?”

  Jenna shrugged. “Who knows where it will pop up first. So many people have been digging into my life, it was bound to surface.”

  “Whitney Stone,” Cassie guessed and Trent scowled.

  “Or someone like her,” Jenna whispered. “Once the police know—” She glanced at her husband. “Well, there are leaks in every department.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Carter muttered.

  Seeing her mother so miserable broke Cassie’s heart. She and Jenna had struggled over the years, and Cassie had often felt a distance between them, but maybe this explained it a bit, the secret her mother had harbored, the guilt she’d borne over her first child.

  Cassie said, “They have to find the nurse. Maybe she could lead us to Allie, tell us why she told me Allie was okay.”

  “You’re certain she was talking about Allie?” Jenna asked quietly. “That Allie was alive?”

  “Yes, I told you that—” Cassie stopped short. Wasn’t that what the nurse had said? What she’d meant? Or had Belva Nelson, who had been present at the birth of Jenna’s first child, been talking about that other sister, the half-sibling Cassie hadn’t known existed? Her gaze crashed with her mother’s and she understood that Jenna’s thoughts had traveled down that same unfamiliar road.

  Cassie felt as if her world were shrinking into a deep, dark hole. Had the nurse actually said Allie’s name? She thought hard to that ethereal night in the hospital when the woman had seemingly appeared, like a ghost from the past. The dreamlike conversation wasn’t clear. “Oh . . . God . . . I think . . . I mean I’m pretty sure she was talking about Allie.”

  But she wasn’t certain. Not a hundred percent.

  “I don’t remember,” she said and her own voice sounded strangled. Had she held on to the old nurse’s words, believing she was talking about Allie, when really, that was only because at the time, Allie was the only sister she knew, the only sibling in Cassie’s world?

  Jenna picked up her glass and took another drink.

>   “I think she was talking about Allie, Mom. Why would she tell me about someone I didn’t even know existed?” She felt wounded and raw inside and Jenna recognized it.

  “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry,” Jenna said, setting down her drink and looking her daughter in the eye. “I hope to God I’m wrong about this. I hope my other daughter is somewhere safe, with a loving husband and kids and . . . and that she has nothing to do with any of what’s happening.” Stiffening her spine, she added, “Even considering that she may be a part of this seems like a betrayal. To her. To you. To all of us.”

  Carter’s eyes turned dark. “You’ve got to quit beating yourself up about it.” Again, he hugged her and she looked up at the ceiling in her fight to regain control of her emotions.

  Cassie was fighting her own instinct of denial. Another sister? An older half-sister she’d never heard of? She wanted to think this was all wrong, but staring at her mother, witnessing Jenna’s guilt and despair, she understood the worry, was infected with her mother’s fears. She grabbed her husband’s calloused hand. “Trent’s right. We don’t know anything, not yet.”

  Jenna offered the tiniest of smiles, one without any real warmth. “Look, you need to get going. I don’t want to keep you, but I just wanted you to hear this from me. Not from someone else or a cheap tabloid or on . . . on stupid mystery week on a cable channel.”

  “So wait. Whitney Stone does know about this?” Cassie sensed her mother was holding back, probably protecting her again. “Shane?” she asked, eyeing her stepfather.

  “You’d better let her know everything,” he advised his wife, and Jenna sighed.

  “Mom?”

  “It’s nothing. Just . . . well, Whitney Stone left me a pointed voice mail.” Jenna found the chair where she’d tossed her purse and after sitting down plucked her cell from a side pocket. After scrolling through her messages she found the one she wanted and hit the speaker button. A second later the reporter’s voice was audible.

  “This is Whitney Stone again. I would appreciate a call back. Sooner rather than later. You know I’m working on the next episode for Justice: Stone Cold, and I would love to interview you. It really would be in your best interest. I’ve done a little digging into your life and I would love your input before the program airs. Some of the information I’ve found is private, I realize, but I still think the public, your fans, would love to learn about you, and your life before you became a star.” A pause. As if she was constructing her thought. “To be clear, I’m not talking about the whitewashed version that your publicist spins, but the real truth. Your fans want to know who you are. The real Jenna Hughes.” Another pause. Then, “So please, call me.”

  Click.

  “Wow.” Cassie stared at the phone. “You think this is about your first child?”

  “Yeah, I do.” Jenna nodded, then cleared her throat. “I don’t know of anything else that would make her feel so empowered.”

  “It’s a threat,” Carter said, pissed. He walked to the window to stare into the night. “The woman’s a vulture.”

  Cassie muttered, “Or worse.”

  “She’ll be at the party tonight,” Jenna predicted. “Members of the press have been invited, you know, to create a buzz about the film.”

  “As if there wasn’t enough of one. Since Allie’s been gone she and the movie have been in all the tabloids and on all the entertainment shows, the gossip columns. Everywhere.” She didn’t say it, but in some ways Allie’s disappearance was the best publicity Dead Heat could get. Even the homicides of people associated with the film fascinated the populace and even appealed to the more macabre of filmgoers, elevated the intrigue factor of the movie, created a buzz, trended on social websites. It was sick.

  “I just wish . . . I wish Allie were here, too. I would tell her . . . everything.” Jenna’s tears began to fall again. “Oh, God, where is she? What happened to her?”

  Carter was at her side in an instant, lifting her from the chair, holding her close.

  Torn, hating witnessing her mother fall apart, Cassie said, “Mom, if you want me to stay—”

  “No, no!” Jenna said emphatically as she pulled from Carter’s embrace. “Go.” She made a shooing motion. “Try and have a good time.”

  “Oh, yeah. Right,” Cassie said dryly. “As if! Geez, Mom, I’m not going because I think it’ll be fun, and Trent didn’t want to go at all, but I might see someone there who knows something about Allie.”

  “Wouldn’t they have said something by now?” Jenna said.

  Cassie shook her head. “Not if they’re hiding something.”

  Sighing, Jenna said, “I suppose anything’s possible. Listen, I didn’t mean to ruin the night. But I thought you’d want to know. About your half-sister.”

  “I did. Or do.” A million questions about this mystery sibling skated through her head. Who was she? Where was she? Did she know about Jenna? What kind of family had adopted her? Were there other brothers and sisters? What had been her life?

  Most importantly, what, if anything, did she have to do with the murders and Allie’s disappearance?

  CHAPTER 33

  With Double T riding shotgun, Nash gunned her little car up the steep incline. Around narrow, hairpin corners that cut through the thick forest of the Cascade foothills. She drove as if the devil himself were on her tail, her fingers clamped around the steering wheel, her eyes focused on the twin beams of her headlights that knifed through the darkness and steady rain.

  Even Double T, usually cool, was clutching the handhold and saying, “Sheeeit, Nash, this ain’t the Indy 500!”

  She didn’t care. The sense of losing time, of sand slipping through the hourglass of this investigation caused her stomach to curl into a mother of a fist and her foot to tromp on the gas pedal. She couldn’t drive fast enough to the cabin where she’d hoped to find Belva Nelson.

  Through a search of city, county, and state records, Jenkins had located the property listed under Belva Nelson’s father’s name, which Nash had double checked with Nelson’s niece, Sonja Watkins. At first Watkins had played dumb, but Nash had put the legal screws to her and when confronted with the fact that Watkins and her ex-con husband could be jailed for hampering an investigation, the woman folded. Reluctantly Watkins had admitted that her aunt had been holed up in the rustic property ever since learning of Holly Dennison’s death. Beyond confirming the address, and the number of Belva Nelson’s disposable cell, Watkins had offered up as little information as possible before clamming up.

  There was more to the story, Nash was certain, but Sonja Watkins wasn’t talking.

  Nash negotiated another sharp curve. God, this mountain road twisted like a sidewinder.

  Why had the nurse, who had held her silence for over thirty years, suddenly felt threatened and the need to sneak into the hospital in some weird, retro uniform no less? What was that all about? Why not just have a regular face-to-face, or call? What was with all the high drama? It was as if the nurse had been playing some part in a kitschy Jenna Hughes film.

  How did she know that Allie Kramer was alive and okay?

  Sonja Watkins wasn’t saying. If Belva Nelson’s niece had known any more, which Nash wholeheartedly believed, Ms. Watkins was keeping it to herself. Watkins had even mentioned she might not talk to the police any further except with an attorney present.

  Which probably meant she was guilty of some bigger crime.

  Nash intended to find out just what that was, after she talked to the retired nurse, the very nurse who, Nash had learned, had been in attendance at St. Mary’s Hospital when Jenna Hughes had delivered her first baby.

  “Hey! Take it easy. She’s not goin’ anywhere,” Double T warned as her little Ford slid a bit and the forest grew more dense.

  “You don’t know that. She might already be running like a damned rabbit!”

  “She picked a great place for it. This is like the ends of the earth.”

  Nash almost smiled. Almost. Instead she adjusted t
he defroster as the windows were starting to cloud. Outside, it was dark as pitch, a wind blowing harshly, tree branches swaying in a wild macabre dance as they were caught in the glare of the Focus’s headlights. Not another car was on the skinny ribbon of asphalt that threatened to turn to gravel around each new bend.

  “Jesus,” Double T said. “When she decided to hide, she wasn’t kidding around.”

  “She was scared.”

  “Don’t blame her. But up here in the middle of nowhere? This is better than the city?” Snorting in disgust, he clung to the handhold. “Don’t think so.”

  “We’re almost there.”

  “Good.”

  What did the nurse know about Allie Kramer’s disappearance? About the homicides?

  Whoever was behind the murders hadn’t killed people randomly, then placed weird masks over their faces. No way. The killer had picked people associated with the film. Nash didn’t believe the choice of Holly Dennison and Brandi Potts as victims had been coincidental. Did Belva Nelson know why?

  Nash frowned. The pieces of the puzzle were finally starting to fit together, but there were still huge holes that Nash didn’t understand.

  She hoped Belva Nelson could fill in the gaps.

  In the meantime Nash had instructed Jenkins to cross-check any information on the birth of Jenna Nash’s secret child with everyone associated with Dead Heat, on the off-chance that Jenna’s first-born was somehow associated with the movie. It seemed far-fetched, as the connection to Jenna Hughes alone would explain the masks, at least to a deranged mind. So why bother using people connected to the movie as victims? And, in Potts’s case, an obscure connection. Not many people knew that Brandi Potts was an extra on the film. Only those close to the production of Dead Heat, those in the inner circle, would even know Potts existed.

  A rush of adrenaline shot through Nash. Someone connected with the movie had to have had a personal vendetta against Allie Kramer. Cassie Kramer? Brandon McNary? Some other person who had become Allie’s enemy? Or the missing star of Dead Heat herself? Just how diabolical was Allie Kramer? Her beauty was only surpassed by her intelligence, which, according to IQ tests, was off the charts.