Crash & Burn

by Lisa Gardner

  Or Madame Sade would take away your food, shred your clothes, slash one of your new toys, maybe the one she’d just given you the day before. She’d twist your arm behind your back, so hard you could barely breathe, and she’d remind you of everything she’d bought and paid for. Oh yes, including you. So you’d better wise up, shut up and entertain that man over there, because it wasn’t like anyone would miss you if you didn’t show up one morning for breakfast. Lots of things disappeared in these deep, dark woods. Including ungrateful little girls.

  I wised up. I shut up. I entertained that man over there.

  But I also watched the boy out mowing the lawns. I studied him from beneath my lashes as he strode across the grounds. I caught his eye from time to time, as we passed in the hall.

  Vero had the magical queen and the lost princess from the secret realm.

  I had entire fictional conversations with a young boy I’d never officially met. Until, of course, I lost my place in the tower bedroom.

  Now I look back at the sky, to the blank space on the horizon where there had once been the three-story turret. She’s close, I think. Very close. No longer just a presence in my mind, but here in these overgrown ruins.

  “Vero took my room,” I hear myself say. “She arrived, and I was booted downstairs.”

  Thomas doesn’t say anything.

  “I hated her for that. I didn’t have to. I could’ve felt bad for her. She was so young, just this poor little girl torn from her family. I could hear crying night after night, you know. But I didn’t feel any pity. I hated her instead.”

  “Divide and conquer,” Thomas provides gently. “My mother was no dummy.”

  I can’t look up anymore. I smell smoke, and what’s going to happen next . . . The real reason Thomas brought me here.

  “I just wanted my room back,” I murmur now. An apology? To him, to her, I don’t know. “I wanted to pretend to be a princess. Because of course, I knew by then, I was nothing but a whore.”

  Thomas steps in front of me.

  “It’s not your fault. Don’t you understand? That’s why you need to remember, Nicky. Because in forgetting what happened, you’re also forgetting the reason you’re not to blame.”

  “No.” I shake my head, then force myself to look at him, take a steadying breath. “You don’t understand. Vero is my fault. I’m the one who killed her. From the first moment I started hiding the drugs, I knew she’d find them. I knew she’d take them. Worse, I loved her. By then she had become the little sister I’d never had, the closest thing to a best friend. She was family. My only family. And I killed her. Consciously, deliberately. I let her die, so I could live.”

  Thomas studies me. He stares and he stares. Then he says the most curious thing. He says: “And then what, Nicky? Vero took the drugs. But what happened next?”

  Chapter 38

  NO CELL RECEPTION,” Tessa reported, holding her phone closer to the passenger window, as if that might help. “Damn mountains.”

  “Do you know where we are?” Wyatt asked her. Because it felt to him like they’d already been driving forever, and Tessa had a point. So far, all he saw was dark, endless mountains.

  “No, only where we’ve been.”

  “Gotta be getting close.”

  “Can I just say one thing? This road alone proves one of our theories. We’ve been driving forever without even a bear for company. If this is truly the location of the infamous dollhouse . . . no way Nicky Frank magically crawled off the grounds and hitched a ride to New Orleans all by her lonesome. She had to have help.”

  “Thomas isn’t just her husband; he was her getaway,” Wyatt agreed.

  “Interesting basis for a marriage.”

  “And yet they’ve lasted twenty-two years.”

  “Until the past six months,” Tessa grumbled. “When Nicky decided she wanted the truth about her past and immediately became expendable.”

  Wyatt didn’t comment right away. He’d been the first to doubt Thomas. Any man whose wife had mysteriously suffered three accidents. Let alone that Nicky herself had placed him at the scene of the car accident. And yet, the video. Something about the video. The way Nicky still walked right up to him, placed her hand in his own.

  Fear and love.

  Wyatt was making an investigator’s worst mistake and he knew it: He was contemplating two suspects, Nicky and Thomas Frank, and seeing himself and Tessa.

  “Come on,” Tessa prodded him now. “You’re telling me you’re suddenly a fan of Thomas Frank? At the very least, he met his distraught wife Wednesday night, handed her a pair of fake fingerprint gloves, then seat-belted her into her vehicle before pushing it down a ravine. Hardly the actions of an innocent man.”

  “Fan would be a big statement. Just gotta say, for the record, the vehicle in question was a new Audi Q5 with airbag this and safety feature that. Hardly a death trap. Plus, he put on her seat belt.”

  “Better to cover his tracks, make it look like an accident.”

  “Nicky was already drunk. She’d done that on her own. An investigating officer wouldn’t have questioned the lack of seat belt.”

  “He’s not an investigating officer.”

  “True. It’s just that . . .”

  She stared at him. “Spit it out.”

  “I don’t know. The cop in me agrees with you. Clearly here’s a man with plenty to hide. And yet, two decades of marriage later . . . You said it yourself. Just because he saved her that night didn’t mean he had to marry her. And even if his job was to somehow keep tabs on her, watch her for Madame Sade. Twenty-two years later, how do you fake that kind of relationship? I don’t know. I watched that video tonight, and . . . There’s something there, some kind of dynamic we don’t understand yet.”

  “You’re a romantic,” Tessa informed him.

  “I prefer the term open-minded.”

  “The picture she drew of him. Thomas was at the dollhouse. The expression she sketched on his face. Thomas was not a happy kid. Meaning he was definitely part of what was going on back then. Nicky starts to remember everything, those memories put him at risk.”

  “He would’ve been young himself. Possibly a victim as well.”

  “The look in his eyes was hard.”

  “I thought he looked determined.”

  “Wyatt!”

  “Tessa!

  “You know I love you, right?” he said abruptly.

  In the passenger’s seat, Tessa stilled. He could tell his words had caught her off guard, and yet they hadn’t. Love and fear, he thought again. Except not Nicky and Thomas’s, but their own.

  “I’m not good at this,” Tessa murmured.

  “Tessa, what’s wrong?”

  “Can’t we just . . . solve this case? You like arresting people; I like arresting people. We’ll be fine.”

  “Is it Sophie?” he asked steadily. “Because I can be patient, Tessa. I know she hasn’t fully accepted me yet. That’s okay. I’m in this for the long haul.”

  She didn’t answer.

  Sharp turn in the road. Forcing himself to focus.

  “John Stephen Purcell,” she stated abruptly. “Police just located the gun used to kill him. I’m told they recovered a single latent print.”

  Wyatt couldn’t help himself; he exhaled sharply. “That’s it? A gun? A recently recovered gun? That’s why you’re so distant?”

  “You don’t understand. John Stephen Purcell, the man who shot Brian, my husband . . .” Her words were weighted with meaning.

  “No, no, no,” he interjected hastily, hands flexing on the wheel. “I understand plenty. And we’re not married, so this doesn’t fall under privilege, and there’s definitely no need to say more. God, Tessa. I thought you were breaking up with me.”

  Her turn to frown. “It doesn’t bother you? I’m not just talking about what the p
olice might discover; I’m talking about what I once did.”

  He didn’t even have to think about it. “No. You saved Sophie. Tessa, I know who you are. It’s why I love you so much.”

  She fell silent again. Not ominous this time. More pondering.

  He reached over and took her hand. Heard her own heavy exhale.

  “Tessa,” he said, keeping his voice light, “you’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

  “What if I don’t have a choice? One fingerprint; that’s all it will take.”

  “We’ll figure it out. Two smart people with lots of law enforcement and legal connections. You really think we can’t figure this out?”

  “I can’t lose Sophie.”

  “I know.”

  “One thousand ninety-six days. I told myself it should be enough. It isn’t.”

  “I know.”

  “Plus, you know, the puppy. I haven’t even met the puppy, and I can’t leave the puppy. Our family is changing; that’s what Sophie said. Our family, my family. I can’t give it up, Wyatt. I can’t lose all of you.”

  “Then we’ll figure it out. Together. Because that’s what families do. That’s what we do.”

  And suddenly, he got it. How far a man might go for the woman he loved. Or what Thomas Frank had being doing that night, at the scene of his wife’s accident, bearing a glove with fake fingerprints.

  A desperate husband, taking one last desperate chance . . .

  “Stop!” Tessa shouted. She twisted away, pointing at a spot along the darkened road just as their headlights swept by. “That’s our turn. The road to the dollhouse. Wyatt, we’re here!”

  Chapter 39

  I CAN’T STAND still anymore. Thomas has the light, but I don’t want to see. I walk away from him. My head hurts. My heart hurts. I put my hands over my ears as if that will help, but it’s no use. I can still hear the screams.

  She’s here. I feel her. In the wind, in the vines, in the hardness of the granite foundation. And it makes me shiver. Because I could handle the Vero in my head. The girl who came to visit. The skeleton who stayed for tea. But this Vero . . .

  This Vero can hurt me.

  “The first five years,” Thomas says from his perch on the granite blocks, “Mother kept things simple. We fostered a couple of girls at a time. Always teenagers; they’d stay a year or two, then leave. Aged out, right? But eventually, Mother became greedier. By then, she’d made some other . . . connections, in the industry. Now no more fostering. She simply brought in young working girls. Got them directly from their pimps. Or, as in your case, purchased them from their own families. No witnesses, no fuss. Everyone’s equally guilty, right?

  “I think she also started taking requests. Maybe from several of the clients, or just the wealthiest. I’m not sure. But the girls became younger. For example, she brought you in at ten. But that also made things trickier. Younger girls might seem easier to control, but some of the new charges . . . Their backgrounds were more hard-core. They grew up lying, stealing, hitting, punching. I remember my mom slapping one of the new girls. I’d just walked into the room; I was maybe thirteen, fourteen. I stopped in my tracks, shocked. But then the girl, half the size of my mom . . . she slugged my mother back.

  “So my mother upped the ante. She drugged them. Claimed they were addicts anyway. She was simply doing them the favor of avoiding the horrors of detox.”

  Thomas paused, smiled faintly. “Funny the way you can know things aren’t right, but still not allow yourself to think of them as being wrong. For example, if I acknowledged my mother was criminal to supply drugs to addicts, then I’d have to also know she was sinful to have a ten-year-old girl shut up in the tower bedroom. Or worse, little Vero, only six years old when she walked through our door.

  “I couldn’t . . . She was my mom. And I was just a kid. Like the rest of you, I had no place else to go.”

  Thomas leaves his granite block. He moves to standing in front of me, trying to get me to look at him. But I can’t. Too many things are exploding in my head, and the memories are both simpler and more horrible than I want them to be.

  The new girls were mean and awful and cruel. Before, we had each kept to ourselves. Now I had to watch my back. It wasn’t enough to hate the men. I had to hide my hairbrush, hoard my dresses, watch my stash of sweets.

  The girls were older and wiser. Especially compared to Vero and me. Madame Sade ended up pairing us up in a single room.

  Otherwise you’ll be eaten alive, she’d informed us coldly. Seriously. Wise up.

  I hated Vero. Whatever mean things the other girls did to me, I turned around and did to her. The trickle-down theory of pain. And maybe that did make us a family. A large dysfunctional family where each member competed to dish out the most hurt.

  Vero started telling stories. Whispering them under her breath. Secret realms. Magical queen. Kidnapped princess.

  At first, I think she was simply comforting herself. But eventually . . .

  I made her keep talking. Tell me more about this mother who loved her daughter. Tell me more about this daughter who knows one day she’ll make it home again.

  We slowly but surely became allies, as the dollhouse darkened and twisted around us.

  “I couldn’t pretend things were normal anymore,” Thomas says now, as if reading my mind. “At a certain point, even I understood most foster families didn’t have kids locked in towers, and normal deliverymen didn’t look so shady, nor lick their lips every time a girl walked into view.

  “I confronted my mother. At least, I tried. I said we shouldn’t be a foster family anymore. I was worried about the girls. Couldn’t we just . . . go back to the way things used to be.

  “‘What?’ My mother laughed at me. ‘You mean poor?’

  “‘If you want to help the girls,’ she told me, ‘then the least you could do is assist with their medicine.’ Which is how at the age of fourteen, I started driving our car into town, meeting with ‘business associates,’ then returning to the home with drugs. I wasn’t even legal to drive. Meaning that of course I was extra careful every inch of the way, terrified that I’d be pulled over by some cop. My mother had no patience for fools, not even her own son.”

  I look up at him. “You became a dope dealer. You made all the purchases. You kept us drugged out of our skulls!”

  Thomas doesn’t deny it. “Where would I have gone, Nicky? What would I have done if my mother turned me out? Her gift was equal culpability. She turned us all into her partners in crime. Then none of us could escape, because all of us were too terrified of the consequences.”

  I want to argue with him. I want to yell and scream because it would be easier to blame him. Maybe once, I even did. But now I have an image in my head. A teenage boy with a mop of brown hair, all arms and legs, striding down the front steps of the house, moving with purpose. At the last moment, turning, looking back. The expression on his face. Frustration and longing and rage. Before turning once more toward the vehicle.

  He was a prisoner, too. I remember thinking it then. The irony that he was her son, her actual son, and he was just as much a victim as the rest of us.

  Vero once said she felt the sorriest for him. The rest of us didn’t belong here. But Thomas had been right: Where else could he go? Madame Sade was his family. This was his home. How do you escape that?

  Vero and I lasted longer than most. But eventually, years and years of hopelessness took their toll. Vero talked about the magical queen less and less. I no longer imagined long, quiet conversations with the boy I’d once watched mow the lawn. We succumbed. Depression. Fear. Anxiety.

  Then, when we refused to turn out at night, do as we were told—because what did it matter?—Madame Sade shot us up. First me. Then Vero.

  I should’ve protested. I should’ve run, fought, anything. I would’ve liked to have been the girl who at least hit
back.

  But I didn’t. I stood there. I held out my arm. And when the meth first hit my vein . . . the rush. Suddenly I was alive for the first time in years.

  While Madame stood there smiling with the syringe.

  She didn’t just victimize us. She taught us to victimize ourselves. Go along to get along. So we did, so we did, so we did.

  Until the day I started hoarding my drugs instead.

  “I figured out what you were doing,” Thomas says now, with his uncanny ability to read my mind. “It took me a few days to notice it; that your eyes weren’t as glazed over, your expression was more alert, your responses quicker. I kept handing over your supply, and you kept accepting, but clearly . . . I didn’t say a word. If you wanted off, I wasn’t going to rat you out. I admired you, Nicky. You were up to something. And I thought it was about time someone had a plan.”

  “I’d had enough,” I say simply. “And I don’t mean of being an addict. I mean of living. My first plan wasn’t to sober up and escape. Once, I’d thought about it. But even sober, walking out the front door . . . I had no hope in the woods; they’re too thick, the terrain too steep. That left the driveway, but she’d simply send you to fetch me.”

  Thomas doesn’t argue. That’s what would’ve happened, and we both know it.

  “My first thought wasn’t escape; I was going to OD. Which meant, of course, I needed to build up a certain quantity. Then I’d take it all at once. Vero watched me. She knew what I was doing. Then one day . . .

  “She’s the one who told me what to do. And you want to hear something funny?” I smile at Thomas, and even now, all these years later, my eyes well with tears. “My first thought was that she just wanted my stash. She was looking out for herself, manipulating me. Of course, I wouldn’t hear of it. She’d OD on my drugs? Then I’d simply take her place in the body bag. No way!

  “But Vero . . . she always had a way with words. An ability to tell a story. ‘Vero wants to fly,’” I murmur. “All those years later. Vero wanted to fly; she knew she was never going home again.