As if to remind me what I was missing, I heard shouts in the common area I shared with two other units. Before I came inside the sound designer and recording engineer, as well as two editors and a fact checker, had been grilling miscellaneous cuts of meat. The composer of our theme music, along with two production assistants, had been laying out salads and desserts. Several cops, a lawyer, and our personal technology wonk, had promised to stop in later. They had advised us during the countless hours when we’d been so depressed about the show’s prospects that we had secretly honed our resumes.
I was itching to join everyone, but I was worried. Our father, Dale Gracey, who’d had bypass surgery six days ago, was due to come home from the hospital that afternoon. While I lived on the east side of the state, Wendy was staying on the west, just a few miles from our parents while her submarine commander husband was submerged—God knows where. It was possible she’d heard something I hadn’t.
Wendy always gets the news first. When you grow up in the shadow of a much older sister, you learn not to protest. The flaws of an older child are bleached by time, while a younger’s are always in plain view. When the older child is Wendy, who is good at nearly everything, the right daughter to help during a family crisis is obvious. I am either protected or overlooked. That’s how we roll.
The one place where I beat Wendy hands down was the written word. Although she’s now forty-three, judging from the text, my sister still couldn’t spell. Of course it was possible abbreviations and misspellings were one and the same. But how would I know? Wendy started college the year I was born. By the time I was in kindergarten she was learning to be the perfect Navy wife. Wendy turned into a larger-than-life role model who popped in now and then to tell me how big I’d gotten, while proving, by her very existence, that I could never catch up.
At last my cell phone blasted the opening notes of Carly Simon’s Older Sister.
“Hey.” I waited, knowing that if I didn’t, my next words would be swallowed.
For once she didn’t hop right in. “Listen,” she said after a pause, “this is serious. I need your help.”
I’m suspicious of emotions, including my own, but I felt an unmistakable surge. Delight I was needed, countered by fear something unthinkable had happened. “Is it Dad?”
She fell silent again, but when she finally spoke she sounded surprised. “No. No, last I heard he was doing okay. I’m not in Florida. Remember?”
It was my turn to be surprised. When our father was catapulted into emergency bypass surgery last week, Wendy had been out of town traveling somewhere in the west for the development company that Dad built one rental property and vacation resort at a time. Wendy is Gracey Group’s concierge and tour manager, and the story goes that as Dad was being wheeled into the operating room, he demanded that our mother tell her to continue the trip.
I was almost sure, though, that she had been scheduled to fly back to Seabank before he was released from the hospital today.
The details were a little foggy because I hadn’t yet been home. The moment I’d learned about the surgery, I had offered to drive to Seabank, but Mom had insisted I stay put on Florida’s Atlantic coast until Dad was ready for a real visit. In the meantime, Mom-of-Steel had continued to care for Wendy’s young daughters, Holly and Noelle, while Wendy was away.
Now, even for her, taking care of the girls and a post-surgical patient was going to be impossible. My father was used to telling everyone else what to do. He was bound to be hell on wheels while he recovered.
I hoped I was worrying for nothing. “When do you get back?”
“That’s the thing. I’m not coming home. I can’t, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to. I need you to go back to Seabank and take care of the girls until things clear up for me.”
“You’re kidding.” I really thought she might be.
“I don’t want to go into detail. Can’t you just trust me and do it?”
I paused, with no plan to restart until I made sense of her request. Finally I said the only thing that occurred to me. “Look, this sounds crazy. You have to tell me more.”
“Great. Thanks a lot.” For the first time Wendy choked up, as if she was trying not to cry. “I’m in Phoenix. Okay? There was a murder last night, and I’m pretty sure the sheriff will think I’m involved. I need to disappear for a while until it’s sorted out. Is that enough to get you moving?”
I tried to rearrange her words into sentences that didn’t catapult our family into an unfamiliar dimension. “Murder?”
“Yes. Probably, anyway. Will you help?”
“You’re not kidding, are you?”
“You got that right.”
Stunned, I fell back on the advice I would have given anybody. “If you run they’ll find you, and then you’ll look doubly guilty. Talk to a lawyer and get advice on what to say, how and when. Do it right now. I can get you a referral.”
“Don’t you think I know what a huge mistake that would be? I listen to your podcast, Ryan. I was right there in that awful prison with that poor woman, the one who was sentenced for a crime she didn’t commit. That’s as close as I want to get to iron bars and a cellmate named Butch.”
I wasn’t sure which was more startling. That my sister was on the run, or that she listened to my podcast.
My heart was pummeling my chest. “If you see a lawyer, he or she won’t turn you in. Attorney client privilege, remember? They’ll help you figure out the best thing to do. You don’t have to take their advice. But it could save you a lot of time and hassle.”
“Ryan…” She sniffed, and her voice vibrated. “I can’t take a chance I’ll be arrested. I know if I lay low long enough, the murderer will be found and then I can surface. But I don’t know anything that will help, and there’s no guarantee these local bozos know their way around a murder investigation. Cops peg somebody for a murder right off the bat and stop looking. I don’t want to be that somebody.”
She was talking about a problem called confirmation bias, and she was right. Sometimes cops pegged a murderer early in the investigation, and from that point on they only looked for evidence that would prove they were right. “What do you need—”
But she was way ahead of me. “Drive to Seabank. Call Mom as soon as I hang up and give her some reason I didn’t fly home this morning. But not the truth. That would kill Dad. Once you get there, take the girls back to the townhouse and stay with them until I’m able to come home. Can you do it? You can work in Seabank, can’t you? They’re in school during the day. And if you’re there, you can help Mom if she needs you.”
She made the trip sound like a cozy holiday. I pictured our family toasting marshmallows and singing Now the Day is Over. I could play cheerful auntie and give comfort to our mother, the same woman who wouldn’t grab my hand if she was sinking in quicksand.
The whole idea was crazy. I hardly knew Holly and Noelle. When I was with them they hardly spoke and always refused my invitations to swim in my parents’ pool or collect shells on the beach.
I was such a bad aunt that I was usually relieved when they refused.
I tried once more to change her mind. “Are the authorities looking for you yet?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then just come home. Please. Right now.” My voice was growing shrill. “Drive to another city if you think you need to, and get a plane home from there. I mean it. It would be a big deal for a sheriff to arrest you in Florida and take you back to Arizona, unless he has an open and shut case. Maybe the navy will give Bryce leave so you can work this out together.”
“Are you going to help or not?”
“What if I say no?”
“Then Mom’s going to be alone with the girls. And she won’t know why I’m not there, because I’m not calling her or anybody else. In five minutes I’m going to disappear.” She drew in an audibly ragged breath. “This is the last call I’m making on my cell phone.”
“What am I supposed to tell her?”
/> “You’re the journalist. Come up with a story.”
“Wendy—”
The line went dead. If I tried calling back, I knew she wouldn’t answer. As far as Wendy was concerned, we were finished.
Where had she called from? I’d heard background noise as we spoke, cars passing on what might have been a highway. Last year after Wendy lost a cell phone, I’d helped her place a tracking app on her new one. Now I went through the steps to locate her, but the app had been disabled.
I zipped down to recent calls and hit Wendy’s number just to be sure. I waited until I heard her voice again, but as I had predicted, this time the voice was a recording. She told me, in the sweetest, most genuine way, that she was sorry to miss my call, asked me to leave a message, and wished me a good day.
Of course nothing about the recording was true. Wendy wasn’t sorry to miss my call, and she’d made it clear there was no point in leaving a message.
Worst of all? I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to have any good days, not a single one, in the near future.
Copyright © 2019 by Emilie Richards McGee
A Family of Strangers—coming soon from Emilie Richards and MIRA Books. Pre-order today!
ISBN-13: 9781488053009
The Surprise of a Lifetime
First published as A Stranger’s Son, in the volume A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Delivery Room by Harlequin Books S.A. in 1997
This edition published in 2019
Copyright © 1997 by Emilie Richards McGee.
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