Crash & Burn

by Lisa Gardner

  “I switched our clothes. I wrestled her into the bed, tucked her in. Then I took her place on the rug.” Wet with vomit, rank with urine. “Rolled myself up. Ordered myself not to move again.

  “Eventually, the door opened. Footfalls sounded as the caretaker arrived. I couldn’t see, only hear, as he heaved me up, tossed me over his back. Thump, thump, thump, down the stairs, his shoulders digging into my stomach. I’m going to vomit. I can’t vomit. I’m already dead.

  “Outside, he heads into the woods, striding heavily over rocks and tree roots. It’s raining. I can feel it through the rug. A dark and stormy night. Perfect for digging a grave. Shortly, he stops. Tosses me to the ground. I want to scream. But I don’t. I’m already dead.

  “Then, suddenly, he lifts me up. He heaves me in. Just like that. No last visit from Madame Sade, no final words from the so-called family. Just . . . whomp. I am garbage and now I’m gone. Then, of course, he picks up his spade and begins refilling the grave.”

  Marlene’s grip on my hands is so tight now, our knuckles have gone white. I’ve lost all feeling in my fingertips. But I don’t draw back. I stare at her, and I realize for the first time how truly angry I am. Because six-year-old Vero had believed in her, the power of a mother’s hugs. Six-year-old Vero had fought to be brave for her, the eternity of a mother’s love. Except six-year-old Vero never should have been in that house at all.

  It comes to me for the first time. I shouldn’t have had to save Vero. This woman, Vero’s mom—that was her job.

  “The dirt is heavy,” I tell her now, my words hard, clipped, biting. “Wet and solid. I can’t move my legs. I can’t move my arms. I’m trapped. Pinned. Suffocating. I really am going to die.”

  “I’m sorry,” Marlene whispers.

  “Just when I think I can’t take it anymore, the weight settles. The caretaker leaves. His job is over. Now mine begins. As I wriggle and wrestle and tug and pull. I fight, fight, fight my way out of the grave. I burst out of the dirt into the middle of the storm, gasping and heaving and covered in mud. I return from the dead.”

  Lightning forking across the sky. The feel of rain upon my head. And air, pure, blessed air, which I draw into my lungs over and over again. I laugh, I cry, then I curl into a ball and completely break down. Because I am alive. And all it cost me was my best friend, my only friend. The sister of my heart.

  I let go of Marlene’s hands. Suddenly, violently, I push away from her. “I knew what would happen.”

  She doesn’t know what to say. Standing near the table, Wyatt takes a step closer, as if thinking he should intervene.

  “I knew she would overdose. She was tired, depressed. She was an addict, unable to help herself. And still I let her see where I hid my stash.”

  “Baby,” Marlene begins.

  “Don’t! You knew there were dangers in a park. You knew what could happen to unattended children. Still you drank and took Vero there.”

  She shrinks back, doesn’t say a word.

  I’m wild. My head is on fire, but worse, my heart is breaking. I’ve let the memory in, and now it’s that day all over again. “Just like I knew, if I hoarded the drugs, of course she might take them. Only one way out of the dollhouse, and she’d had enough. I knew. And still I did it. Because her death gave me the best shot at freedom.”

  “Vero—” Marlene tries again. I shake off her hand.

  “I’m not Vero! Don’t you get it? She’s not me. She’s just a ghost inside my head. She’s a past I’m still trying to save, a mistake I’m still trying to face. I don’t know; I don’t completely understand it. I wanted to see you, but I never wanted to talk to you, because I can’t do this. I can’t . . . go back. I can’t . . .” Words fail me; I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I take two steps forward, rustle beneath the pillow and grab the photo I’d found in Thomas’s jacket. “Here.” I practically throw it at her. “You want your little girl? This is all that’s left.”

  Marlene takes the photo. She holds it closer, then frowns. “Who is this?”

  “Vero, of course. Surely you recognize—”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “What?” My turn to draw up short. I blink my eyes, scrub at my temples. Finally remembering what I once worked so hard to forget has hurt me. I know I’m disoriented; I know I’m not functioning on all cylinders. But still.

  “That’s Vero,” I insist. “Taken at the dollhouse. I found it in Thomas’s pocket.” I say the last sentence without thinking. Now both Wyatt and Tessa have closed the gap between us, studying the photo intently.

  “No, it’s not,” Marlene insists. “I understand this picture was taken later, but that girl still isn’t Vero.”

  “Are you sure?” Wyatt asks Marlene. “It’s an old photograph, not the best resolution, but the hair, the eyes . . .”

  “Look at her left forearm,” Marlene instructs him. “There’s no scar.”

  “What scar?” Me again, my voice strangely high-pitched.

  All of a sudden . . .

  Vero is back in my mind. Vero is grinning at me with her gleaming white skull. Vero, who has always felt separate from me.

  “Wait for it,” she whispers. “One, two—”

  “Vero has a scar,” Marlene says. “From, um, an accident, when she was three. She was pretending to be an airplane. She um, hit the coffee table.”

  Except that’s not how Vero tells the story. In Vero’s story, told night after night to her roommate, Chelsea, Ronnie the wicked knight tossed the princess into the air. He hurtled her into the table: “You wanna cry, little shit? I’ll give you something to cry about . . .”

  Marlene turns to me now. Real time. Real life. No memory to forget.

  “Show him,” she instructs me. “Your left arm. The scar.”

  I move in slow motion. I raise my left arm. I roll back my long sleeve.

  I expose what I already know will be there: a long, pale expanse of perfectly unblemished skin.

  I realize at last, the final secret remaining in that yawning black box of memory. The tidbit I withheld even from myself, because all these years later, I still didn’t think I could handle it. Vero lives inside my head, not because she is some dissociated version of my past. Vero lives inside my head because I’m the one who killed her.

  As Marlene gasps. “You’re not my daughter.”

  And Vero, triumphant as ever, yells: “Surprise!”

  Chapter 30

  WHO ARE YOU?” Marlene Bilek had her hand wrapped around Nicky’s wrist, gripping tight. Across from the older woman, Nicky winced in clear discomfort. “You know things. How do you know such things? What did you do with my daughter?”

  “Ma’am, please.” Wyatt hastily inserted himself between the two women. He had to forcefully pry Marlene’s fingers from Nicky’s wrist.

  The older woman turned on him. “What kind of sick game is this? You told me you had found my daughter. You said you had proof!”

  “We have fingerprints, Mrs. Bilek. Fingerprints that match your daughter’s—”

  “But she’s not Vero! She doesn’t have the scar. Vero has a scar—”

  “Okay, okay. Everyone, deep breath. Let’s take a step back for a second.”

  Wyatt got Marlene to one side of the room, Nicky to the other. Marlene appeared nearly wild-eyed with grief, rage, betrayal. Nicky simply looked bewildered. And she was already rubbing her temples, a telltale sign of an impending migraine. Wyatt could feel a killer headache coming on himself, and he hadn’t even suffered three concussions.

  Tessa took over Nicky, helping the woman into one of the wooden chairs to one side of the room, while Wyatt positioned Marlene Bilek in a chair on the other side. Tessa retrieved cold bottles of water from the mini-fridge. She handed the first to Nicky, the second to Marlene.

  Both women took a long drink.

  Wyatt used th
e minute to regain his own composure. It was creepy to him, but watching the two women, sitting in one hotel room, not just their similar coloring, but the way they moved, the way they held themselves. He could believe they were mother and daughter, no problem.

  Except according to Marlene Bilek, that was impossible.

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” he said, after another moment had passed. He turned to Marlene. “You’re saying Veronica has a scar.”

  “Left inside forearm. Right below the elbow. Two to three inches long. From the coffee table.”

  “Ronnie threw her into it,” Nicky intoned. “Picked her up. Vero was just a little girl and he tossed her into the wooden table like a piece of trash. The table broke. One of the legs gouged her arm.”

  “How do you know that?” Marlene demanded.

  “Vero wants to fly,” Nicky whispered. “She just wanted to fly. How could you stay with him? How could you let her suffer like that?”

  Marlene paled. She didn’t say another word.

  “You’re sure about the scar?” Wyatt asked again. He couldn’t help himself. Vero couldn’t have a scar. Because if Vero had a scar, none of this made any sense.

  “Check the missing persons report,” Marlene informed him crisply. “It’s listed under identifying marks.”

  Tessa did the honors. She pulled her copy of the report from her computer bag, gave it a quick perusal. When she glanced back up, Wyatt saw the answer in her eyes. She nodded once, an affirmation that, yes, they had passed into the land of crazy.

  He turned to Nicky. “Who are you?”

  “I’m lost. No one wanted me, even before the dollhouse. No one loved me, even before the dollhouse.”

  “You’re Chelsea,” Wyatt put the pieces together. “You’re the roommate.” He thought he got it: “Who killed Vero in order to escape.”

  “Except I’ve been trying to save her for the past twenty-two years.”

  Wyatt shot a glance at Tessa. She’d tried to warn him there had to be a reason Nicky had buried her past. This sounded good enough to him.

  “Chelsea—”

  “Nicky.”

  “Nicky. Did Vero die that night?”

  “There is only one way out of the dollhouse.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked carefully, aware of Marlene Bilek’s sharp intake of breath.

  Nicky didn’t answer. The anguished look on her face was proof enough.

  “Then how did her fingerprints wind up in your car?”

  “She didn’t die!” Marlene picked up immediately, leaning forward in her chair. “She was with you! You’ve seen my daughter. You know where she is.”

  Wyatt turned to Nicky. She was frowning, scrubbing at her forehead again. “Shhh,” she whispered. “Just . . . shhh . . .”

  “Are you all right?” he asked her cautiously.

  “She’s laughing at me. I hate it when she’s in this mood. I wish she would put on clothes. Or at least skin.”

  Wyatt and Tessa exchanged another glance.

  “Nicky,” he commanded briskly. “Wednesday night. You’re in your car. You’re driving to the New Hampshire state liquor store. You came to see Marlene Bilek, Vero’s long-lost mother. Who is with you?”

  Nicky opened her eyes. She appeared miserable, but not misleading. “Vero’s with me. She’s always with me. But not like you think.”

  “You’re looking for her.”

  “Always.”

  “You want to keep her safe. You failed her once, and now you’re stuck trying to get it right.”

  “Yes!”

  “Nicky,” Wyatt took her hand, held it between his own. Her fingers were ice-cold, in sharp contrast to the beads of sweat forming on her brow. They didn’t have much time left, he realized. Regardless of his concerns about the rest of the case, Nicky’s concussions were real enough, and the stress of the situation was taking its toll. Any minute now, she’d be hammer-smacked by a migraine, and that would be that.

  “Once and for all, did Veronica Sellers, did your friend, your roommate, make it out of the dollhouse?”

  “Vero learned to fly.”

  “The drugs, she OD’d on the drugs.”

  Nicky stared at him. Stared at him, stared at him, stared at him. And for the first time, Wyatt got it. It wasn’t that she couldn’t admit these things to the police. It was that she couldn’t admit them to herself. Chelsea, who’d been unloved before the dollhouse, but who’d found a sister while living in it.

  “Yes,” she whispered. Then she closed her eyes, which suited them both, because he wasn’t sure even he could handle the pain he saw there.

  “Nicky, I have to ask you another question.”

  She swallowed heavily.

  “The fingerprints, the ones we recovered from your car . . . How did they get there?”

  “She had to be with you,” Marlene spoke up urgently. “My daughter. You’re lying about her death. She was with you that night in your car.”

  Nicky shook her head. “No, it’s not like that.”

  “It’s not,” Wyatt agreed. “We had a search dog on the scene. And according to Annie, there was only one occupant of the vehicle, the driver who hiked up to the road.”

  “But then how do you explain the fingerprints?” Tessa pressed. Her brow was furrowed. It made him feel better to know this was as perplexing to her as it was to him. “You can’t fake fingerprints. No two sets are alike. Not even with identical twins.”

  “True.” Wyatt’s gaze fell to Nicky’s hands. They had recovered prints from Nicky’s car, but until this afternoon they’d never printed Nicky herself. They’d questioned her, visited her home, taken her on a road trip, but printed her . . . No, it had never come to that.

  Meaning at the end of the day, they had recovered Veronica Sellers’s fingerprints from Nicky Frank’s car. But that didn’t mean they were Nicky Frank’s prints.

  Of all the stupid, idiotic, rookie mistakes. He’d have to call Kevin immediately and have him perform a comparison of Nicky’s prints from this afternoon and Veronica Sellers’s childhood prints from thirty years ago.

  “Nicky,” he said now, “those prints were left in blood. I saw them for myself. They weren’t old prints. They were made that night. Left in blood, your blood, on the car seats and dash of your vehicle.”

  “Vero wants to fly,” she whispered. “And the car flew, so weightless. I can feel her smile. I can feel her laugh with me.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing stays weightless forever.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s not the flying; it’s the landing that’s the hard part.”

  “Nicky!” he commanded firmly. “Look at me. Consider the photo. That’s not a picture of Vero. Do you understand me? That’s a picture of you! You. Meaning however Thomas got that picture . . . This isn’t about Vero. It’s always been about you.”

  “You’re wrong.” Nicky looked up abruptly, stared Marlene straight in the eye. “It is about Vero. She never should’ve been in the dollhouse. She never should’ve died there. Twenty-two years later, she still wants her revenge. And we will all pay in the end.”

  * * *

  WYATT ESCORTED MARLENE Bilek back into the adjoining room. Having made her grand announcement, Nicky had collapsed on the nearest bed. For her part, Marlene seemed to have gotten over the worst of her anger and now seemed shell-shocked instead.

  Wyatt made Marlene review the details of Vero’s description once again, but she had nothing new to offer. Her Vero had had gray eyes. Nicky Frank’s were blue. And her Vero had a scar on her left forearm. Yes, the coffee table accident had happened exactly the way Nicky described it, and no, she wasn’t proud of it, but the fact that Nicky knew the details didn’t change anything in Marlene’s mind. Nicky Frank might know all the stories from Veronica Sellers’s
life, but she still wasn’t Marlene’s long-lost daughter.

  As for the fingerprints retrieved from the woman’s vehicle . . . They just didn’t make any sense. If Vero was still alive, why hadn’t she contacted her family? For that matter, why had Nicky gone to the trouble to track down Marlene through Northledge Investigations? It wasn’t like Marlene had come into a large inheritance since her daughter’s disappearance. She and her family were strictly working class, meaning there was no financial gain to posing as Marlene’s missing child.

  “She’s sick,” Marlene said at last, seeming to have finally talked herself into some semblance of empathy. “And I don’t just mean the way she keeps rubbing her forehead. Nicky, that woman . . . she’s a little crazy, isn’t she?”

  Wyatt hesitated, unsure how to answer that question. “I think she’s honestly confused.”

  “She thought she was Vero,” Marlene said. “I mean, buying the quilt, tracking me down. It’s like she really thought she was my daughter.”

  “She seems to feel a strong connection to Vero,” Wyatt said at last, which was the most he could understand the subject.

  “Why?”

  He found himself hesitating again. “Mrs. Bilek . . . For everything that comes out of Nicky’s disjointed mind . . . I don’t think she’s delusional. In fact, I suspect many of her recollections are genuine memories. If that’s the case . . .”

  Marlene grew quiet. “You think she’s telling the truth about this dollhouse. Those stories she told me in the beginning. They really did happen. To Vero. And to her.”

  “I think we owe it to Nicky and Vero to find out.”

  She looked up at him. “My daughter died there. This Chelsea girl, she found the strength to get off the drugs. Whereas my Vero . . .” Her voice broke; she swallowed heavily. “That’s why Chelsea can’t let her go. She used my daughter’s death for her own escape, and she’s been feeling guilty ever since.”

  “I don’t think we should rush to any more assumptions.”

  Wyatt retrieved the sketches Tessa had provided earlier. “Do you recognize this house?” He showed Marlene Bilek the picture of the dollhouse. The woman’s face shuttered. She eyed the drawing stonily.