The Girl in the Mist: A Misted Pines Novel

by Ashley, Kristen

  The next, set it aside.

  Then he picked up a coffee mug that was sitting on the counter, turned and side-arm threw it with great might across the kitchen.

  It crunched through the wood of a cabinet, and I heard some plates breaking.

  “Dad,” Jace said quietly. Both he and Jesse were positioning for lockdown.

  Bohannan turned back to the file and said to it, “Dead girl at my pier, he left her for me. Told me he was gonna do it right…” he stabbed a piece of paper with his finger, “fucking…” he stabbed it again, “here.”

  Oh my God.

  I closed my eyes.

  I saw her.

  Malorie.

  They’d closed her eyes.

  So I opened mine.

  Thirty-Two

  Invisible

  Humans are animals.

  As such, we adapt.

  We’re also individuals.

  As such, how we do that is unique to every one of us.

  I’d learned how to read people, to quickly but carefully observe every nuance I could gather in order to construct the full visual of their puzzle, and then behave accordingly, because I grew up in a house without love.

  My mother didn’t have a good relationship with her parents, so they were in my life, but not deeply. My father left before I formed memories of him, and his parents hated my mother and weren’t thrilled she had me, so I had no memories of them either.

  She did not beat me, though there were times I wished she did.

  I wished she did because I could understand that as a crucial flaw in her character. Everyone knew it wasn’t right to physically abuse a child.

  She fed me. She clothed me. She didn’t leave me alone to fend for myself. When she wasn’t around to watch over me, I had keepers.

  She was also an ambitious woman. She worked to get ahead. We were not wealthy, but by the time I hit double digits, we lived in a relatively decent condo in a neighborhood that wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t as terrible as the ones we’d been in before. A condo that, even if it wasn’t much, it was decorated to impress.

  As for me, I was “normal.”

  I had friends. I was always pretty, so I was relatively popular. I liked school, I liked to learn, and I did well there. I dated. I lost my virginity at the age of seventeen to a boy I liked very much and had been seeing for some time. It was the worst sex of my life, and there was a bit of pain, but it was my choice, and it didn’t mark me or turn me off future interludes.

  But I lived in the world, so I knew that a mother was supposed to love you. Care, not only for you, but about you.

  And I did not have that.

  So I found ways to adapt.

  One of those ways was to watch TV, which was why I became an actress. A decision I would later realize was a mistake, not only because it wasn’t my true calling.

  Another way was to read, a lot. This didn’t only take me away. I was naturally a dreamer. I would understand about myself years later that I was born to be a writer not only with the way I consumed books nearly all my life, but also with the way my mind sought stories.

  This was one of the few things I had from my mother. She often bought me books, and I was grateful she did, even if I grew to understand she did it because she knew she wouldn’t have to put up with me if I was in a book.

  She also never refused me permission to go to the library, which I frequented and in which I spent a good deal of time.

  Indeed, the only semi-motherly woman in my life was a librarian named Donna, who not only shared my love of books, but who read in me why they were so important.

  It was not her job to look after me and give me the love I didn’t have.

  But she did her best, and it was she who was sitting beside me in the audience when I won my Emmys. And it was her name in the front of We Pluck the Cord, because it was dedicated to her.

  It was also she who was buried with a first edition, the first one I signed, of that book folded in her hands and my National Book Award medallion resting on her chest.

  As I grew up, my mother complained about me in a way that was both constant and consistent, but it too was negligent. An aside. A nuisance.

  She did not like me dragging on her time. She did not like me dragging on her resources.

  I remember with an alarming clarity the day she came home with her first pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes, a pair she’d found at a consignment store.

  I remember how she put them on, traipsed around the house admiring them, and as if talking to herself, not even glancing at me, which was how she always did it, she said, “I can’t wait until you’re gone. I’ll have the money to buy more of these. Next, I’m getting Chanel.”

  I also remember those times I was meant to disappear.

  Not literally, but as close as I could get.

  “I’m probably going to be bringing someone home tonight, Delphine, and you do not exist. You hear me?”

  I’d learned what she meant when, in the beginning, I’d had no idea what she meant and inadvertently existed when I wasn’t supposed to, and her negligent abuse became much more focused.

  What she meant was that I was not to do that first thing to be a discoverable presence in our home when she brought a man there to fuck him. She was an attractive, single, unencumbered professional, and I was not to belie that.

  Eventually, she’d learned, if there was one she might want to keep, this wasn’t the way to play it. Men, understandably, were not fond of finding out at the third hour that the woman they were banging, a woman they were thinking they might want to spend more time with, had a kid—and she’d hidden that.

  In this time, I would find there was an irregularity in my mother’s behavior.

  She’d had three men in her life who she also introduced into mine. The irregularity was that they were all good men, and I knew that because I still had relationships with all three. All of them reaching out to me when I found fame and fortune, doing it in a genuine, proud, not-quite-fatherly but definitely affectionate way.

  I still had them when she did not have any of them.

  But as an animal, I’d learned to adapt to my circumstances.

  TV.

  Books.

  Fantasies.

  Dreams of escape.

  Making plans for a better life.

  Puzzling out the pieces of everyone who came into my orbit.

  And total shut down.

  I did not like to hear my mother, who was loud during sex, having said sex.

  Mostly, I did not like having a mother who not only wished I was not alive, not only told me at times to pretend I wasn’t alive, but was oblivious to the fact I was so very good at it.

  I didn’t even get a pat on the head for doing what she asked.

  I left home at eighteen with five hundred dollars in my pocket, but long before that I’d been living a separate life to my mother.

  Those Years debuted when I was twenty-two.

  Once it did, it was impossible for me to disappear.

  But there were still times when I’d done it.

  For instance, when my friend Isabella came over. She was starring in a movie with Warren. And she told me she’d walked in on him fucking his PA in his trailer. Everything about her screamed she hated saying it, but as a friend she couldn’t not, so I believed it.

  Then he’d come home, and I’d confronted him, and he’d denied it, then admitted it, then denied it had happened before while he was married to me, and everything about him screamed he was lying.

  I’d shut down then. Warren said later he thought he’d have to call a doctor to admit me to a hospital. I was completely non-responsive, walking around like an automaton.

  And then it happened again, when an irate female percussionist in Angelo’s band was fired because he was done screwing her, and she wasn’t happy about that, and she reached out and told me he was fucking his way through his latest tour. She also shared that I should know he did that his last tour, during which he’
d been married to me.

  I’d had time in with Angelo (unlike Warren). I’d been older and wiser when I married him (I thought), and it wasn’t that I didn’t love Warren, it was just that I realized I’d been too young to make that kind of commitment with him.

  With Angelo, it was different.

  I’d loved him sensibly. I’d loved him sincerely.

  But I’d also loved him deeply.

  Therefore, in a fit of self-preservation, I’d first confronted the tour manager, who’d predictably and complicitly lied.

  Then I’d taken it to Angelo, who had done the same, but it was half-hearted. The jig was up. He knew with my history with my mother that I’d adapted by fitting puzzle pieces together so I’d never read a situation unclearly and put myself in positions that were worse than I was accustomed to.

  That was, I did this except with the two men in my life, both having been able to successfully hold important pieces from me until I was in too deep to protect myself from the pain (enter a decade and a half of celibacy).

  I’d shut down with Angelo too, but I’d told Angelo how I used to do that and why.

  Therefore, he’d led me to our bed and held me until he could get me to snap out of it.

  That was the last time we laid together. The last time he held me.

  He’d eventually claimed sex addition.

  I’d filed for divorce.

  And the last I’d shut down was the last I’d been in her presence.

  It was Christmas four years ago.

  My mother had nagged an invitation for her and her husband to share the holiday with us. The girls were not keen. Although they’d formed an uneasy relationship with their grandfather, they had zero tolerance for my mom.

  She was retired. Going on cruises. There was some tour of Scandinavia they were considering. During a trip to New York City, she’d seen Carolina Herrera at Sotheby’s.

  She’d married a year or so after I left.

  I had not been invited to the wedding.

  Her husband sat in my living room by the Christmas tree, staring off into space, and that flipped some switch in me.

  Because she was so pathologically self-involved, he’d now been conditioned to live a life as I’d learned to be.

  Invisible.

  And she was being self-involved then. Talking to us about things we didn’t care about because we didn’t care about her, not letting anyone else speak.

  Being there at all when she’d done not one thing in her life to be welcome there.

  It was Camille who shook me out of it. As usual, I hadn’t known I was doing it.

  It wasn’t as if I slipped into catatonia. I did not speak, but I went through the motions.

  When I came back, I saw how alarmed my daughter was, which alarmed me.

  After my mother was gone, Fenn had declared, “That bitch is never coming back.”

  Fenn hadn’t missed it either.

  That bitch never came back.

  I could do my daughterly duty.

  But I was not again going to force that on my girls.

  I explain all of this, because it happened that day after Malorie Graham’s body was found.

  I’ve no idea what triggered it.

  It could be any of a number of things.

  The fact that, after Bohannan had his fit of anger, Jace and Jess walked out of the house without a word but clearly on a mission, knowing their role and setting about doing it.

  Or the fact that Bohannan came to me, hooked me under the chin with the side of his crooked finger, touched his mouth to mine, and said, “I gotta dive into this, baby, you gonna be all right?” and I’d nodded mutely before he disappeared in his office with the file, his door closed.

  Or the fact that the killer was sending letters to the sheriff, addressed to Bohannan, which was scary in itself, but it led to a new body that was floating at the end of Bohannan’s pier.

  Or the fact that it came to me, where I’d heard the name Malorie, and that was when Celeste mentioned her as the senior who’d started the shipping materials recycling locker in town. A senior last year, so if it was her, that put her dead at nineteen.

  More than likely, it was the fact that I had no role to play in this, a feeling I had felt often growing up, that I had no place in the life I was living with my mother.

  And more, the fact I was a mother. I’d lived through my two beautiful girls making it beyond age nineteen, and I had in my life another who I got to love and guide and share time with. But this one, this unknown girl, I could not help in any way. She was beyond help. And she’d more than likely died, alone, scared and wanting her mother.

  But all of this was exacerbated by the fact that right then, I was living a life. A beautiful one. But a life where, one second that morning, the man I cared about was holding me and whispering promises in my ear, and the next we’d learned a girl would not live to stand in the arms of someone who loved her, listening to them whispering promises in her ear.

  For whatever reason it was, it happened.

  I had absolutely no idea what I did in the few hours after it went quiet that morning.

  I just knew I shut down.

  And I was glad I could do it when no one was watching.

  Because it would come to pass that I had no choice but to start up again.

  Thirty-Three

  Bedlam

  It started with a door slam and Celeste crying, “Delly!”

  I was sitting in one of the high-backed, leather armchairs that were pointed toward the kitchen.

  The pistachio couch had a view to the lake.

  I remembered I’d selected that seat because I didn’t want to look at the lake.

  Then I didn’t remember anything else.

  Until then.

  I came to, my body jolting, my head turning to her.

  “I’ve been calling and calling,” she said, racing to me.

  I stood just in time for her to hit me.

  I held her in my arms, and she squeezed tight with her own, exclaiming, “Oh my God! Everyone is freaking.”

  I looked over her shoulder to the kitchen, trying to read the time on the microwave, but it was too far.

  Celeste answered my unasked question by pulling away, now holding on to my wrists, and saying, “No one could concentrate. They let us leave school early.”

  “Celeste—”

  “Oh right, maybe you don’t know. They found another girl dead, Delly. Malorie.”

  Well…

  Hell.

  She’d heard the news.

  She just hadn’t heard where they’d found Malorie.

  And she’d been in such a state, she hadn’t seen the crime scene tape that now cordoned off the pier.

  I really liked the guy, and he had it rough right now, and I’d take the hit of talking to her about boys.

  But this was all Bohannan’s.

  It was like I’d conjured him, because the second I had that thought, he prowled down the hall into the great room, gaze moving between Celeste and me, face set to neutral with a smidge of pissed (maybe) or impatient (better possibility).

  He said, “Hey, honey,” to Celeste, then instantly turned to walk under the exposed landing of the upper floor, which meant walking to the front door.

  He opened it but it didn’t seem like he opened it. It seemed like it exploded.

  It seemed this way because he was forced back when a balding, burly man of somewhat below average height surged in, shouting, “I’m gonna fucking kill him! I’m gonna fucking rip his fucking head off and shove it up his fucking ass! I’m gonna fucking piss on his dead body and take a shit every day on his FUCKING GRAVE!”

  As the man had made it to the great room, Bohannan had moved in, and with him came a tall, attractive woman who had at one point that day been exceptionally well put together.

  Now she was not.

  “Bobby,” Bohannan murmured.

  Bobby’s arm raised, his hand slanting to jab with his finger downward, prob
ably because Bohannan was taller than him, and like an angry bear, he was making himself be as big as he could get.

  “This is on fucking HIM! Before I shove his fucking head up there, I’m gonna bend him over his fucking sheriff desk and RAPE HIS FUCKING ASS!”

  “I appreciate you’re feeling a lot right now, Bobby, but my women are here and so is yours. That means you either get a goddamned lock on it or I’m tossing you out of my house.”

  Bobby swung around to look at me and Celeste.

  Mostly Celeste.

  And when he did, it was all over.

  “Cade,” I said swiftly.

  But it was too late.

  Bobby’s face went red in an instant. It crumpled, and he did too.

  Right to his ass on the floor.

  He curled, chest into his thighs, covered his head with both arms, started rocking and moaning, “My girl. My girl. My girl.”

  The woman who came with him whimpered, but she did not go to him.

  Bohannan did.

  He approached, crouched and patted him on the back, muttering, “Let that shit out. We got work to do, man. You gotta let that shit out.”

  Bobby made a very loud snuffling noise that ended with him releasing a breath that sounded like it came from a mouth that was closed, so it made shee, shee, shee, shee noises as it broke four times.

  He was crying, and it wasn’t that he didn’t want to cry and was fighting it, it was just the power of it was overwhelming to the point he could barely breathe.

  Unmistakably, Malorie’s dad.

  “Honey, why don’t you go upstairs,” Bohannan said to Celeste.

  “Okay, Dad,” she replied.

  She gave a careful, tender look to the woman, whose lips curled up in a tremulous smile before she turned away.

  I took her hand, squeezed it, Celeste glanced at me while I did, then I let her go—and alive and full of youth and grace—she dashed out.

  I watched her do it.

  And I memorized every step.

  The woman watched her do it too and didn’t quit watching even after Celeste disappeared from sight.

  “Would you like to come in and sit down?” I invited, bringing her attention to me. “I can make some coffee.” I had no idea what time it was, but still, I offered, “Or open a bottle of wine.”