Whatever Doesn't Kill You (An Emma Howe and Billie August Mystery Book 2)

by Gillian Roberts

  She stifled a smile. Who was the one with the feeble memory?

  “I’m working on it. And how about you? Have you remembered anything else?”

  He shrugged slightly and shook his head.

  “Then let me ask you a few things. You said Tracy was scared the last few times you ran with her.”

  “I already told you.”

  “But she never said of what?”

  He shook his head.

  “Not even a hint?”

  He shook his head once more, then stopped himself, and wrinkled his brow. “She said…she said that she got in trouble and she couldn’t get out.”

  The bad thing?

  “But she did get out,” he said. “She left Robby.”

  “Is that what she meant?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “So you think she was afraid of Robby?”

  He nodded.

  “But she told you she was afraid after she had left him, so do you think she was still afraid he’d come after her?”

  Gavin looked worried. “She was still scared after she left him.”

  Billie nodded. The chair’s configuration hurt her back, and she shifted her weight, wondering if these chairs were part of the process of punishment, even for visitors. “Did Tracy wear rings?”

  “Her wedding ring.”

  “A fancy ring. Big, glittery thing.”

  He shook his head. “A wedding band, that was all. It said ‘Forever T and R’ inside. She showed me.”

  Gavin didn’t seem to have the guile or instinct for self-preservation a lie would require. He hadn’t known about the emerald and he surely hadn’t lusted for it.

  “Oh, wait,” he said. “Wait.”

  Billie’s heart fluttered. Maybe now a ray of memory, an illumination. She’d show that Michael Specht. She’d get to the heart of something.

  “She didn’t wear the wedding ring anymore after she left Robby,” he said. “Even though she was still married.”

  That seemed that. No answers for Michael Specht, and both her vanity and wallet would be deservedly deflated. Unless…“Do you remember telling me that you were going to help Tracy some way, but she didn’t get to tell you how?”

  “I don’t like to talk about that.”

  “It could help. It could help a lot.”

  “I would have helped her. She said I’d know how, but I didn’t.” Maybe the notes would have told him.

  “I don’t know what I was supposed to do.”

  “It’s not your fault,” she murmured.

  “Then she was dead and I was here and I still didn’t know if she gave it to me like she said.”

  “Wait—did she say she gave it to you? Or that she was going to give it to you?”

  His brow wrinkled again. Billie felt cruel putting him through this, but if Tracy had in fact left information for Gavin, and if it was about the “bad thing” for which she was going to make amends—and if that bad thing, or the making amends for it was why she was living in a state of fear—then Gavin had a chance.

  A whole lot of ifs.

  No wisps, no theories, Michael had said. He’d forgotten to say “no ifs.” Maybe she could get away with a technicality.

  Gavin scratched behind his ear. The gesture seemed a part of his thinking process. “Maybe she said she told me what to do. Or was going to tell me. Or maybe she said she gave me it. I wasn’t listening right and I don’t know where it is.” His expression was bleak.

  “That’s all right,” Billie said quickly. “How could you? She didn’t tell you that, did she?”

  “I don’t know.” He sounded pitifully young and miserable. “I don’t know. I don’t remember things good, and I should know—I think she did tell me, and I asked them to let me go look, but they didn’t, and anyway, I don’t know!”

  “Don’t worry about it, Gavin.”

  “It mattered to her,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “She was my friend and I promised her. I promised to help her.”

  Billie nodded. “Then I’ll find it,” she said with resolution and conviction she didn’t feel. “I’ll find it and you’ll feel better. How could you find it if they’re keeping you here, anyway?”

  She felt ashamed of herself as his face flooded with gratitude and relief. He believed her. He trusted her.

  As if his life depended on it.

  As it did.

  Thirty-Four

  In Emma’s entire life, she had never spent this much time contemplating housewares. Her kitchen equipment had been catch-as-catch-can, a realistic start, she thought, to her entire domestic life.

  She considered herself a sufficiently good cook. Nobody starved or died of malnutrition around her. But she had neither the time nor the interest, and probably not the palate, to bother with whatever required this enormous range of apparatus. Obviously, she was in the minority. The place was crowded—almost all women, almost all in intense pursuit of the graters, slicers, mixers, grinders, and dicers that Emma had lived happily and well-fed without for a lifetime.

  She was bored, but not enough to allow Kay Wilson out of her sight. She’d seen the woman’s expression and it had been in search of an escape hatch. Emma was having none of that. For too long already, Megan Kay Caitlin had been on the run in a way Emma didn’t yet understand. Without monitoring, there was nothing to stop her from slipping out a back door and disappearing, becoming someone else again.

  So Emma waited, discreetly at a remove, but there. And finally, the mysterious Ms. Wilson had a break, and Emma moved closer. “Let’s talk now,” she said.

  “I’m exhausted. I’ve been on my feet for—”

  “We’ll sit down. There must be a coffee shop around here.”

  Kay Wilson put up a hand, like the crossing guards Emma remembered. “I don’t want to talk with you, Mrs. Howe. And I don’t have to, I didn’t hire you. Talk to Heather. I want no part of her craziness. I don’t approve.”

  She wasn’t the Milquetoast Emma had first thought her, but of course, the woman Emma had met was an invention. The real woman was a con artist, and slick. “You’d better talk to me,” Emma said. “I’m giving you a chance to explain. Otherwise, I’ll go directly to the police.”

  She blanched, put a hand to her mouth. “Why? Adopting a child is not a crime.”

  “There’s too much wrong with your story. So much that I think abduction or black market child-selling is involved. Or murder.”

  “Oh, my God.” Kay Wilson closed her eyes and shook her head. Her fists were clenched as she took a series of deep breaths. When she opened her eyes, they were moist.

  But she followed Emma, her posture ramrod straight, Emma striding briskly and Kay Wilson, expression registering acute disapproval, more slowly, saying nothing as they stood at a counter, being served. Nothing, until they were at one of the small tables, facing each other. Out of a menu offering eleven coffee options in three sizes each, both had ordered plain coffee, regular size.

  “What is it, then?” Kay Wilson’s voice was sharp and lined with anger, but she herself looked defeated. Maybe it was only exhaustion. She’d been on her feet all day, hawking small appliances. But maybe not.

  “Who are you?” Emma spoke softly, but even so, the woman across from her flinched.

  “You can’t have dragged me here to ask me a ridiculous question like that. You know who I am. I know who I am. It’s Heather who is questioning her identity.”

  “I know who you say you are, but you aren’t Kay Wilson. Or, more precisely, Megan Kay Wilson, the name on Heather’s amended—or not amended—birth certificate. You’re not her, unless you’re dead. And dead for a long time.”

  The other woman looked momentarily flustered, then she pushed her jaw forward, sat back in her chair and eyed Emma coldly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She was good. But then, she’d had years to perfect this identity. “Megan Kay Wilson died nineteen years ago at age nineteen. A few months after your so-called husband Nowell Wilson
died. You must have liked your men young. He died at age fourteen. But then, he must have been quite precocious to have served in the Vietnam War by then and to have had a job, not to mention being allowed to adopt a child at such a tender age.

  “Furthermore, Heather wasn’t born in August, as you told me. She was born the following December, and you’d have known it since the birth certificate was changed to show your—supposed—name. Why the lie? But interestingly, it does not show the name of your imaginary husband who was not raised in New York as you said. You came to my office to purposely cloud the picture, to set me off on false trails. Not a solitary so-called fact you gave me was the truth. I want to know why. And I especially want to know how you got that baby.”

  “Or you’ll go to the police with your suspicions.” Kay Wilson shredded her paper napkin into filaments. She didn’t look at Emma as she spoke in a flat voice, but kept all her attention on the rapidly disappearing napkin. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Emma shrugged. “Prove it to me, or prove it to the police.”

  “You’re going to destroy everything,” the other woman said, her voice chilling because it was soft yet strangled. “Everything I’ve worked for and lived for. Things are better as they are. Don’t tamper with them.” She leaned closer to Emma. “You’ll make everything worse, and for what?”

  “For my mental health. For the rule of law. For my client. But most of all, for the truth. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  “You think the truth is the be-all and end-all. You’re arrogant and you’re wrong.”

  Emma shrugged.

  The skin on Kay’s cheeks had grown mottled with red and pale patches. She took a breath, then, her eyes still on her hands, she spoke in a rush. “We were trash. That’s why it all happened.” Her voice sounded as if it were coming out of constricted vocal cords. But her words smacked at Emma. She’d anticipated explanations and defenses, not this.

  “My mother was sick. She had polio when she was a kid—a mild case, but she dragged a leg and was weak. Couldn’t do much. She worked when she could, but that was barely ever. Dad was a mechanic. And a drunk. Mostly a drunk. Fired a lot, or quit. There were three of us: Megan, Caitlin, and Nowell, named for Christmas even though it wasn’t spelled right. They thought this was more masculine.”

  She glared at Emma, who nodded acknowledgment. One small, but cryptic, piece of the puzzle in place. Origin of the names.

  “Megan was the oldest, and wild. Getting in trouble for as long as I can remember. Nowell was too young still to really carry on, but he wasn’t ever going to be that way. He was quieter, even shy, but a good-hearted boy. Then there was me, the one they called the ‘good one.’ They didn’t mean it as a compliment. ‘Smart’ was what they liked. Not school smart, but smart like getting something over on somebody.”

  She was truly Caitlin Wilson, then. Megan was her sister and Nowell her brother. Both dead. “You lived in Butte County?” Emma asked.

  Caitlin looked startled, then nodded. “When I was sixteen,” she continued. “Megan was three years older and had a baby and a record for shoplifting. People talked about us, but when I was twelve, I’d joined the church and it had become my family. I loved the order, the respectability. I knew those people could help me be different than my real family. Them and my English teacher. Miss Andrews told me I had abilities, that she’d help me find a scholarship. It felt like I’d been in a dark place and somebody picked up a lantern and said ‘Look, there’s a way out.’” Her cheeks puffed and she exhaled vigorously, poof, as if she’d just run a distance. “I probably don’t have to say that Megan didn’t take good care of Heather,” she added quietly.

  “Her baby was your Heather?”

  Kay nodded. She was out of napkins, so she folded her hands, as if she were in school, as if Miss Andrews were still observing her.

  “I’ll get us more coffee.” Emma couldn’t explain it, but these words that so far explained nothing had diffused Emma’s hostility and left her anxious instead.

  When she came back, Kay had found another paper napkin, and was dabbing at her eyes with it.

  “Sometimes Megan was just crazy about her baby,” she said after she’d added sugar and milk to her cup. “She’d buy—or for all I know, steal—gorgeous clothes for her and go show her off, but to places you don’t take a baby. Other times, she’d scream about ‘the brat’ and how tied down she was and she hated the baby so much I was afraid for Heather.”

  So it had been a benign kidnapping. Sister Caitlin foster mother to a child in need of saving. But that didn’t explain the web of lies she’d woven around it.

  “I was the babysitter and most times, it meant I had her all weekend, because Megan wouldn’t come home at all and my mother, she was in bed sick, and you didn’t want my dad babysitting. Daytimes, Megan was there. She didn’t work much. But soon as I’d come home from school, Megan would pass the baby to me and out she’d go with her boyfriend. They were into serious drugs. Taking them, dealing them.

  “I got a summer job through the church, watching a family’s kids at the pool, and when I had to, I brought Heather along. And every night and all weekends, I was with her. She called me ‘Kay,’ couldn’t say Caitlin, you see, but sometimes she called me ‘Mommy’ and…I let her.”

  Kay twirled the coffee stirrer between her thumb and middle finger and looked at the wall across from them until Emma felt obliged to clear her throat and get the woman’s attention. “I hate doing this,” Kay said.

  Emma nodded. It was obvious from the halting speech, from the starts and stops, from her facial expression, but it didn’t matter.

  “It was the end of August, and hot, and I had all my summer earnings on me so I could buy clothes for school, but my dad, he said I should stay home. He had steaks. I don’t know where he got them—traded something for it at work, but there they were. Thick steaks to barbecue for the four of us—mom and dad and Nowell and me. Heather was going to share a piece of mine, if she could chew it, and Megan wasn’t home.

  “What happened was before we got to the steaks, my dad drank too much beer and Heather fell and scraped her knee and she was whining, and he was shouting at her, making threats. So I asked my mother could I borrow the car, take the baby out. I knew she’d say yes. Dad was too drunk to drive, and my mother never drove. Besides, Heather was annoying them.

  “I didn’t feel like shopping. Too hot. I thought I’d drive to San Francisco. I’d never been there, it was too far. Three, four hours. But I dreamed about going there after college. I liked that it was so far away, that it was big, that the water was there. Of course I didn’t make it all that way. It was too late in the day when we started. But we had a good time. We stopped at a fast-food place for hamburgers and I didn’t miss that steak at all.

  “On the way home, after dark, Heather sleeping in her car seat, I heard the news on the radio. My mother and father and Nowell were dead. Murdered.”

  Again, she glared at Emma, as if, somehow, this was her fault and for the slightest moment, Emma thought perhaps it was. “Shot,” Kay said. “The police were looking for Megan. The neighbors had seen the whole thing, just about, and called the police. After I stopped shaking, I turned that car around and headed anywhere as long as it was away.”

  Kay stopped talking and looked at Emma. She laid her hands flat on the table. “That’s it. That’s who I am. It gives me a headache to think about it. I hope you’re satisfied.”

  “I—” This was nothing like what Emma had imagined. In many ways it was the opposite of that. “I’m sorry for— That is a terrible story. But I’m not satisfied. I’m not clear what happened then.”

  Kay sighed. “Isn’t it obvious? I couldn’t go home. They said on the radio that I was not a suspect, that I’d left early in the day with—I swear, the radio called her my child. I heard it, that mistake. Maybe that gave me the idea. If I went home, they’d know that Heather was not my child, and they’d take her and put her in foster care. I was sixte
en and still in high school, with no real job. They wouldn’t let me have her. If I went back, she was doomed.

  “I was too afraid to go to San Francisco just then. I don’t know why, a little place seemed safer. Or easier. That night, we made it to the coast, around Fort Bragg, and we slept in a motel. The TV said my sister and her boyfriend had been captured in another shoot-out at the boyfriend’s house. They weren’t smart or sober enough to get away. Megan was injured badly, the news said. Her boyfriend was dead.

  “It seems Megan and her boyfriend had barged in and gone berserk about the steaks. About how there weren’t any for them. There was this fight and my father got his gun and told them to get out, but Megan’s boyfriend jumped him and got the gun away and was beating the hell out of him and Megan took the gun and shot our mother and dad, and even Nowell, because he tried to grab the gun away.”

  She lowered her head and Emma heard her sniff, then look up again and clear her throat before she spoke. “Steaks. It was about steaks,” she said. Her eyes were still moist nineteen years later.

  Emma nodded, acknowledging the waste and stupidity of those deaths, along with their toll.

  “We slept in cheap motels and a few times in the car, and we ate fast food. The big problem was Heather’s diapers, but I bought the throwaway kind, and we made out all right. My money lasted us three weeks and by then, we were in Oregon. From there, I called the pastor. I told him we were safe. I didn’t want them worrying—and I didn’t want them searching for me, either. He promised to tell the authorities, but he said I should come back, that they were ‘trying to find a place for both Heather and me.’ I realized I would go into foster care, too, and I knew I couldn’t go back. If he’d said they had a home for us both, I would have gone. I could have finished school. But who’d want a murderer’s kid? Or her sister?

  “He told me Megan was in a coma. Later, I read in the papers at the library that she’d died. It meant there wasn’t a trial and that was the end of the story.

  “I told the pastor that we were going to an aunt’s up in Oregon, where we’d both live. I never was in touch again, of course. But Oregon felt safer, being in another state, in a little town that had never heard of the Wilsons or the Barbecued-Steak Massacre.” She folded her hands and nodded, as if her story were completely done.