Dark Road Home

by Anna Carlisle

  But she had another motive, and as she scanned the small crowd gathered to watch the media set up in front of the steps, Madeleine directing her staff from the podium she had moved to the base, she saw that she was in luck. Jake was leaning against a tree near the street, his arms crossed over his chest.

  Despite his mirrored sunglasses, no one could miss Jake’s familiar scowl and ramrod straight posture, and people were giving him a clear berth. He either didn’t notice the many glances directed his way or genuinely didn’t care. Half the crowd probably had already convicted him in their minds by now, Gin thought, and the rest might if Richard had a chance to speak.

  She’d tried both her parents’ phone numbers but neither picked up. Gin couldn’t share the results of the toxicology report with them anyway; Harper had already committed a breach of protocol by speculating on the findings with her.

  She didn’t dare disrupt an investigation that might finally lead to her sister’s killer, even for the sake of her parents. But there was one man who deserved to hear the news from her.

  She edged over to where he was standing but was blocked by a group of office workers who’d taken a break to come see what the media attention was all about. Before Gin could make her way around them, her mother’s voice rang out over the crowd.

  “Welcome, everyone.” Her mother was flanked on one side by the mayor, an elderly woman Gin barely recognized, and on the other by the city manager. Neither looked very comfortable, and Gin wondered how much political capital her mother was burning through to make this happen. But Madeleine had planned her remarks with care, and as she began by thanking the town for its unflagging support during all the years that Lily had been missing, her voice was clear and unwavering.

  Gin took advantage of the crowd’s focus on her mother to dodge behind the back of the group, slipping between parked cars until she got to Jake. He turned his head slightly to indicate he’d seen her, but said nothing.

  “Listen,” she said, leaning close and keeping her voice down, “I need to tell you something, but I can’t give you any details now.”

  That got his attention. “Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine. And I wouldn’t come to you now, not with everything that’s going on—but I thought you should know, unofficially. Please don’t talk to anyone about this until they release the results, but—they were able to test the infant DNA. You’ve been cleared—there wasn’t a match.”

  She couldn’t see his eyes behind the mirrored lenses, but she caught the tightening of his jaw, the tiny tic at the corner of his mouth.

  “Gin,” he said heavily. “You’re not telling me anything that I didn’t already know. Or anything I haven’t already said.”

  She bowed her head, aware that it wasn’t enough. That she owed him an apology for not believing him. But there wasn’t time for that now; maybe there never would be a way to cross the divide she’d created. “But now everyone will know.”

  “And can you guarantee that’s going to change things?” he said, his voice low and angry. “At least your mother appears to have accepted me back into the fold. Guess I can go celebrate.” Then he turned and stalked away from her, toward his old green truck that was parked down the street, before she could tell him the rest, including the contradictions in the tox report.

  Gin couldn’t chase after him without drawing attention to herself, so she turned her attention back to her mother in time to hear her say, “—the support of our friends and family as our community searches for answers. As many of you know, Richard and I have been friends with the Crosbys and Parkers since our children were barely toddlers. I believe I speak for all of us when I say that we join you in our belief in the law enforcement agencies of our county and town to bring justice not just to my daughter’s killer, but to anyone who would presume to bring hatred and violence to Trumbull, Pennsylvania. This is our town, and we stand together to defend it against all evils.”

  At that point, she gave a slight nod to the front of the audience, and several figures broke from the crowd and ascended the steps to crowd in between Madeleine and the other council members. Gin was briefly surprised to see that the men her mother had asked to join her in front of the cameras were the detectives, Stillman and Witt. But it made sense; Madeleine was the master of the expedient gesture. Gin was sure she’d turned them into the allies that she needed now.

  As Detective Stillman took the microphone and embarked on the careful description of the case using the evasive speech with which Gin was all too familiar from the many press conferences she had been a part of, she scanned the crowd again, and finally found Spencer standing with Christine near the front. He had his hand on Austen’s shoulder, but Olive was nowhere to be seen.

  She waited until Stillman finished his brief statement and handed the microphone back to her mother, who politely turned down the many shouted questions and ended the press conference. Then Gin made her way to Spencer.

  “Oh Virginia, there you are,” he said. He looked exhausted, the color in his tanned face faded, gray smudges under his eyes. “I was hoping I would see you here. I’m so sorry we had to be away for all of this. Christine tells me you were able to make it to Olive’s party.”

  “She’s an adorable girl,” Gin said. “You must be so proud of her.”

  “Oh, I am. Listen, I’ll talk to your father later, but I want you all to know that I want to help with the investigation in any way I can.”

  “Thank you,” Gin said automatically. “I—I know my parents appreciate your support.”

  “I’d better get back,” he said, squeezing her arm lightly. “Half the office is here; we’ve left the place pretty short-staffed.”

  “Of course,” Gin said. “Christine, will you say hi to the kids for me?”

  “Yes, I’d be happy to. Olive would be here, too, but she has a violin lesson. And . . . you know, I wasn’t sure it was the best idea for her to be here. She has such a vivid imagination.”

  Gin almost asked where Tom was, but thought better of it. Maybe he’d stayed back because of what Spencer had already mentioned—too many of the staff were already here. Maybe it was too difficult for him to revisit the past. Maybe he was already starting his happy hour . . .

  It dawned on Gin that, as the onlookers lingered while the media packed up their gear, it would be a perfect time to talk to him, if she could get to the surgery center while everyone else was away. She didn’t want it to get back to the detectives that she was making inquiries.

  She walked briskly, cutting through the park and taking a shortcut she remembered from her childhood, going through the lobby of an old bank that had been converted to offices to reach the surgery center from the back entrance. She found the directory near the elevators and located Tom’s office number. When she got there, he was talking on the phone, turned away from her in his leather chair, gazing out his window overlooking the green valley and the smokestacks rising above it. She waited until he hung up to slip into the office, closing the door behind her.

  Tom glanced up at her, and for a moment, a strange series of emotions flitted across his face. Had she been wrong about him? All those years when she’d thought Tom had grieved with the rest of them, when she thought his deterioration was because he missed not just Lily but—as she herself did, as she believed Christine did even if she never put it into words—missed the way their lives had been, before. The summer Lily disappeared had been when everything changed, when they were no longer children, any of them, and no longer family. Because that’s what Gin had always believed them to be, the four of them, raised by her mother in shared naps and baths and hand-me-downs. Even the romance between Tom and Lily had seemed like a sweet drama, first love as extended childhood, a way for them both to experiment much like Christine and Gin had once married off their Barbies to all the matching Kens. No one had ever taken it very seriously.

  No one but her mother, Gin corrected herself. Madeleine had been firmly—almost forcibly—set agai
nst Lily and Tom’s romance. At first she’d forbidden it outright, but after an unusually tense discussion with Richard, who’d pointed out that it would be next to impossible to enforce a ban on a boy whom she herself had helped raise, Madeleine had settled for strict limits on the time Lily was allowed to spend with Tom, as well as rigid supervision. Which, of course—Lily being Lily—she quickly found ways to circumvent.

  “Hey, Gin,” Tom said glumly. “Isn’t your mom doing a press conference?”

  “It’s over. It made me think, though, that I ought to come and talk to you.”

  “Yeah, sorry about the other day. At the club. I, ah . . .” He gave an unconvincing little laugh. “Had a lot on my mind.”

  Gin looked at him more closely. His skin had an oily sheen over a gray pallor. He looked ill, his eyes glassy, his hair lank. His fingers twitched nervously at the pressed crease of his trousers.

  “No, sure, of course. It’s just . . . listen. I’ve been consulting with the ME’s office.”

  “Christ.” Tom picked up the Red Bull can in front of him and crumpled it in his fist. “You, too? I’m surprised that hasn’t made it around town yet—everything else has. I mean, shit—a baby . . .”

  “It—must be a lot to absorb,” Gin said cautiously. Trying to read his emotional state was like trying to detect patterns in a thunderstorm, his body tense with the anxiety he was only partially successful in hiding.

  “Yeah, and now those detectives want me to come in and give a DNA sample. And not just to prove paternity, either. They think they might be able to match it with some tissue they got from the cooler.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a good idea?” she said. “I was thinking that I should, too.”

  “But we all used that cooler. They could find anything.”

  “That’s why I’m thinking we should do it. Then they can exclude any matches, and focus on anything else they find.”

  “What, like fingerprints from old Lloyd?”

  “Him or—or whoever put her in there.”

  Tom was already shaking his head. “No thanks. Not until they come after me with a subpoena.”

  “But why? If you’ve got nothing to hide—”

  “I don’t,” he said forcibly. “I’m so sick of people pretending I’m not really a suspect. Even Dad, he’s offered his attorney to talk to me.” He made air quotes with his fingers: “Just to ‘get a feel for things.’ Do you know how it feels to have your own father believe you’re capable of killing someone, and he won’t even say it to your face?”

  “I’m sure that’s not it,” Gin said, though she wasn’t, not at all. “Besides, it would take all of a few minutes to give a sample, and you’d never even have to discuss it with Spencer.”

  Tom laughed hollowly. “Seriously? Considering everything else that’s been leaked already . . . you don’t think he’d find out?”

  Gin tried to get her bearings in the rapidly shifting landscape of Tom’s possible culpability. His reluctance to be tested could be an indication that he had something to hide . . . or perhaps something much simpler.

  “Tom . . .” she ventured. “It seems like things between you and Spencer are . . .”

  “Shit. They’ve gone to shit.” He spat the words, but the pain in his eyes was clear. “He’s not even my boss—technically—but that hasn’t stopped him from threatening to can me, just because I came in hungover a couple times. Or have me canned. Or whatever.”

  “But surely he would understand that what happened so long ago, when we were all just kids . . .” Gin struggled to find the words to reassure Tom that she was on his side—and to ignore the pangs of guilt from knowing that she was only being partially honest with him. “That just because you spent a lot of time with her doesn’t mean . . .”

  “That I’m a killer?” Tom laughed bitterly. “Doesn’t matter. If Dad would stop and think for one minute, he’d know I would never have hurt her. I loved her. But that’s not what he cares about. It’s all about how it reflects on the family.”

  These last words were spoken in a perfect imitation of Spencer’s cultured baritone voice, so real that Gin had to stop herself for looking for him in the room. “But with the baby, I mean that complicates things—it seems to me that makes it all the more important that you cooperate.”

  “I’ve been thinking, though,” Tom said, reaching for the minifridge under a corner of his desk and getting out another energy drink. Even leaning down to open the fridge seemed to be a huge effort, his face flushing and his hands trembling as he popped the top. “What if Lily didn’t know it herself? That she was pregnant?”

  “Tom. She was between fifteen and sixteen weeks along. She would have missed her period several times. There’s no way she didn’t know.”

  “But if, I don’t know, she was in denial or something. Or not regular. I mean, you’d know that, wouldn’t you? Being her sister?”

  “We . . . weren’t close that way,” Gin said, hating to admit it. Other sisters talked about everything under the sun. Other sisters probably got their period together, borrowed tampons from each other, complained about cramps and bloating to each other.

  But not Gin and Lily. They’d loved each other deeply—Gin had always loved her sister best among all her friends, had never questioned that their bond was the tightest—but there were things they simply never talked about.

  “She told me.” He blinked, looked away. Perspiration gathered along his brow and he jiggled his leg nervously. “Sometimes. If it was that time of the month.”

  Gin didn’t want to think about those conversations any more than she wanted to think of Tom and Lily together, making love, or their young approximation of love.

  “But you were . . . intimate. And you didn’t use protection?” She phrased it as a question rather than a statement, though she was sure she already knew the answer. Lily would be the sort to believe that nothing bad could ever happen to her, and Tom would be careless, as he was in most things.

  “What do you think?” Tom asked. Then his features compressed into a scowl and he added something unintelligible.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  His gaze arced past her and up to the ceiling and he pushed away from the desk. His hand flew up and then crashed down on the edge of the desk in front of him and he made a sound that, this time, was definitely not a word.

  Gin’s concern abruptly turned to horror when she realized she was witnessing the start of a grand mal seizure. Tom’s limbs began to flail and he crashed to the floor as his muscles went through rhythmic contractions, and she quickly knelt down to clear the floor of anything that might injure him, moving the desk chair, waste basket, and a planter out of the way. She checked her watch to time the seizure, then rolled Tom gently to his side and grabbed a throw pillow from the couch opposite his desk and put it under his head. By the time she estimated that two minutes had elapsed, the jerking of his body was already starting to subside.

  Gin waited until Tom seemed to be past the worst of it to yell out into the warren of offices, thinking it would be quicker than calling. “Tom Parker is having a seizure, can you please send a cart?”

  A woman stuck her head in the door, took a look at Tom lying on the floor, and immediately disappeared.

  “Tom,” Gin said urgently, taking his hand. “Let me know if you can hear me. It’s me, Virginia Sullivan, and we are in your office.”

  He rolled his head back and forth a couple of time, staring first at the ceiling and then at her, but he said nothing. His eyes fluttered half closed, and he made a gasping sound, foamy spittle bubbling at his mouth, but didn’t seem to see her. She eased him back into a comfortable position on his side, and he didn’t resist.

  She continued to speak quietly to Tom, knowing he might not be able to hear her for several more minutes, until he regained full consciousness. She checked his pulse and breathing and wondered if she should make sure that help had been called, when a team appeared at the door with a cart.


  “He suffered a seizure,” she said, getting out of their way.

  “Was this his first?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What medications is he taking?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not—we’re not—”

  “He’s Spencer Parker’s son,” one of the first EMTs said. “We should get him down here.”

  “I’ll try to find him,” Gin said, and she raced for the door, taking one last look over her shoulder. They were starting oxygen, fitting a mask in place. She knew there was little else to be done at this point, at least until they had more information about what had caused the seizure.

  Tom had never suffered a seizure as a child, so that ruled out a number of possibilities. But Gin had a sinking feeling she knew what had been behind this one.

  24

  By the time Gin got back to Tom’s office, unable to find Spencer, he had come around, and was seated in a wheelchair, about to be taken up to a room. “Please, don’t tell Dad,” he said. “Or Christine. I want to handle this myself.”

  “Can I . . . can we talk later?”

  Tom shrugged, looking defeated. “Sure. They’re taking me up to six. There’s a waiting room there. I’m not sure how long I’ll be, though.”

  Gin decided she’d wait for a while, since she didn’t have anything else pressing to do. While she waited, she tried to reach Madeleine, but her phone went straight to voice mail, as it did while she was in meetings.

  It was a good hour after Tom was taken upstairs before a nurse came into the waiting room and told Gin she could go in. Tom was sitting up in bed with an IV drip, looking pale and exhausted. There were purple circles under his eyes, and his skin sagged around his jaw, but he still managed to look almost boyish in the hospital gown, his hair askew.

  “So I guess you probably figured out I’ve been having some trouble,” Tom said awkwardly.

  “You mean with substance abuse. That’s what caused the seizure, wasn’t it? An abrupt withdrawal?”

  Tom raised his eyebrows, then winced, suggesting he was having a postseizure headache. “That’s so not a sexy phrase. Abuse—I didn’t abuse anything. I smoked it, snorted it, railed it . . .” This time his attempt at a laugh made little headway. “Then I discovered benzos. Nice and neat. Easy enough to get, too, if you know the right people at the dispensary.”