“When was it?”
“My wife loved to act,” Harry said. “When the kids were young, Angela would pin up a sheet against the wall, and create these short little skits. They were all so cute together. A lot of times I’d take photos- and when Dani was old enough to walk, instead of acting in the skits, she decided she wanted to take the pictures.”
“Dad, we said let’s talk about something pleasant,” Sharon said gently. “Drop it, won’t you?”
“I don’t want to,” Harry said. “Since I had that heart attack, I’ve been thinking about your mom. About how much I’ve missed her, and will always miss her. It’s been ten years, and part of me still can’t believe she’s just… never come back.”
Caroline’s eyes were squeezed shut. “Dad, just because you’ve been in a relationship for a long time, doesn’t mean that it was the right one. It doesn’t even mean that you knew everything about the other person.”
Dani gave her a look. Caroline almost sounded as though she were talking from experience. Was she talking about Leo?
Harry sighed. “Well, I never told you this, but even after Sheriff Mackenzie closed the case, I hired a private investigator to dig into it. He never came up with anything. Your mother just… never reappeared. Of course, it was a lot easier to vanish back then. Technology has made it almost impossible to recreate that feat.”
“Dad, please,” Sharon protested. “I really don’t think Caroline wants to hear this.”
“Well, I want to tell it,” Harry said. “I need to tell it.”
“Tell what?”
“There was only one thing that the investigator found,” Harry said. “And I don’t know why I never told you of it before but, well, I’m telling you now anyway.”
“What did he find?” Martin asked.
“The car,” Harry said.
Caroline, Sharon and Dani looked at each other, simultaneously confused and anxious.
“You remember that when your mother vanished, she didn’t take anything with her? Not clothes, not even her purse?”
Dani nodded. “That’s why Sheriff found it near impossible to track her down.”
“The investigator worked three years and he finally did catch a break,” Harry said. “He found a big clue. He found your mother’s car, abandoned on the side of a road, some hundred miles from here.”
“What?!” Sharon exclaimed. “Daddy, how could you keep that from us?”
“I didn’t want to,” Harry said. “I was so excited. But the car had been wiped clean of fingerprints and the like. Your mother was nowhere to be found. The only other thing in the car was a box of polaroids.”
“My Polaroids?” Dani asked, feeling goosebumps erupt along her skin.
Harry nodded. “They were photos of us, the five of us. They were photos of the skits she used to put up. There were photos of you, Dani, hugging Puppet. There were photos of you, Caroline, with your best friends. There were photos of you in your cheerleading days, Sharon. And there were photos of me, too. But the photos that had your mother in them? They were all torn. Her face was torn off every single one of them.”
Dani felt like the world was spinning. Her head felt light and the table seemed to zoom in and out of focus. Her dad’s voice was too loud.
“Dad,” Sharon said in a voice that was little more than a breath. “If that’s true, did you tell the sheriff?”
“I did but, by then, it was a cold case,” Harry sighed. “Elaine Mackenzie pointed out to me that this was proof that Angela had, in fact, decided to leave us all behind. After all, what could be more symbolic than removing herself from every memory and leaving the rest behind?”
“Dad,” Sharon tried to say something, but Harry interrupted her.
“After that, I dropped it. I paid off the private investigator and gave up. I felt like a fool. For so long I’d somehow hoped to bring your mother back to us and, instead, I found definitive proof that she never loved us. If she could so cold-bloodedly leave us behind, then I had no choice but to forget her, too. Only my heart still can’t. When I had my attack, part of me wished she was there by my side. Part of me will always want her by my side.”
There was a scraping noise as Caroline pushed back her chair. With a muffled sob, she ran out of the room, leaving the rest staring behind her.
“Maybe this wasn’t the best topic to bring up right now,” Martin said, in a voice about an inch away from being rude. “She’s upset, Harry, I wish you’d just let it be.”
“I had to bring it up. I had to let all three of them know,” Harry said.
Martin nodded, and left the table, running after Caroline. Sharon and Dani both looked at their father.
“Dad. I don’t think it’s a sign that she left us,” Dani said. “If anything, this is the first time in years I’m starting to believe that maybe she didn’t leave us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mom was either a cold-blooded thief or a loving mother,” Dani said. “She can’t have been both.”
“Well people can surprise you.”
“No, this is too much of a surprise,” Dani said. “If she left us, then she left us for a lover and a new life. If she wanted to symbolically say goodbye, why do it in a way that none of us would ever even find? Why not leave a letter instead, or shred those photos at home? It makes no sense.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that, all this time, I imagined that Mom was cold. That she didn’t love us. But, then, the polaroids make zero sense to me. Can’t you see? Why meticulously plan out a new life and have a double life that you keep secret from your family? A person who is capable of doing that is not the kind of person to tear out her face from my photos. No. This was someone else’s work. Someone else, who passionately hated mom, tore out her face.”
“No, no,” Harry said. “I’m telling you, it’s not like that. It can’t be.”
“Are you sure?” Dani asked. “Dad, did mom have any close friends? Any jealous ex-boyfriends?”
“Dani stop it!” Sharon exclaimed.
“What?” Dani looked up.
“Both of you stop it. I don’t want one more word out of either of you!”
“I just wish you’d told us sooner, Dad, if we’d known we could have-”
“Oh, you’re a fine one to talk,” Sharon said. “You still haven’t told him about the phone call.”
“The phone call?” Harry looked up. “What phone call?”
Dani gave Sharon a pleading look, but Sharon shook her head. “I think it’s time we all lay our cards on the table where mom is concerned, Dani. Dad’s attack has made him a little sentimental. I want to remind him of the truth. Mom wasn’t a good person. In fact, two days before she vanished, Dani heard her on the phone with someone, saying that she was in love.”
Harry looked as though he’d been slapped. “You did?” He looked at Dani.
Dani hung her head. She wished Sharon hadn’t bought this up. But, in a way, she was glad that she could finally ease her guilty conscience. “I’m sorry, Dad. I heard her. But after that, I froze. I was too numb for days to do anything. I was confused about what to do. By the time I recovered, she was gone!”
Harry bowed his head, and sighed. “Why didn’t you tell me, Dani?”
“Because I was scared, confused and just eighteen,” Dani said with tears in her eyes. “Because I had no idea what the future would bring.”
“I still can’t believe it,” Harry said. “I never could, you know? When Elaine, I mean Sheriff Mackenzie, told me about it, I said maybe Angela had a partner, but a lover? Never. I was her husband. I would have sensed something different if she had a lover. Yet I never did. But if you heard her, I guess it is true then.”
Dani wished she had something positive to say, but a gloomy silence seemed to overshadow anything she could think of.
*****
Chapter 14
A Confession
When she woke up the next morning, the events of the pas
t few days still buzzed through her mind. Dani wished that she could have had even a little more clarity but her mind seemed to be an endless drain, reliving the same few facts over and over. Jessica’s death. Caroline, found muddy and near hysteria. Caroline’s arrest. Their father’s heart attack. Mixed up with all this, their mother’s disappearance.
What was she missing? She got the feeling that she’d been so caught up in living and reliving these horrible days, that she was missing something obvious.
Jessica. That’s what she was missing. Somehow, through this ordeal, the focus had shifted back on her family, and their terribly twisted lives, along with Caroline’s own complicated love life. But when Dani thought about it with a cool mind, the issue right now was Jessica’s murder.
Who had murdered Jessica and why? That’s what she needed to dig into, with the single-minded tenacity of a bulldog. The sheriff and Darwin were rightfully focussing on Caroline and maybe Dani was being stupid letting her heart cloud her head. But she just couldn’t believe that Caroline was the murderer. It didn’t add up. Even logically, it didn’t add up.
Deciding that she needed to do things a little more systematically, Dani got out a paper and pen, and wrote a list of names on it.
Leo
Martin
DJ.
Mona.
Unknown boyfriend (?)
Those were the only people she could think of who could possibly be involved. So far. She had to go talk to them again, one by one.
She took a quick shower, and put on some jeans and a striped T-shirt, grabbing a cardigan on the way out. She was up early, earlier than the others, who were presumably still sleeping off last night’s tensions. On her way out, she grabbed an apple from the refrigerator and then, on impulse, she ran back up to grab her camera.
Her mind hadn’t been very clear since Jessica’s murder and the one thing she knew that always helped clear it was photography. There was a zen-like calm she attained when she started photographing things. Perhaps this would help her. There was one obvious place she wanted to photograph - the site of Jessica’s death.
She knew that the forensics team had already worked over the site, but perhaps she could spot something. Or, better yet, she could figure out information that the Sheriff’s Department hadn’t released yet, and help Caroline’s case.
Munching the apple, she made her way through the woods behind Hedley Mansion. Jessica’s body had been found in a spot just a few minutes’ walk away from the house, if you knew your way through the woods. Arguably, half of the people in town probably knew their way through these woods.
When she reached the spot, she noticed that the police tape was still up. Yellow tape warning “Do Not Cross” hung around the trees. She squatted on the ground, observing the spot through various angles.
There was a chalk mark outlining where Jessica’s body had fallen. She felt a little chill travel through her at the sight - a little clearing with four pine trees surrounding it. Putting the camera in front of her face, Dani moved around the clearing, photographing it from as many angles as she could.
“Interesting,” she said out loud as she observed the splatters of blood on the trees near the site. Almost all the splatters were at ankle-level. Dani was no expert, but the obvious conclusion seemed to be that Jessica was lying on the ground when she was shot.
What else?
Footprints were useless. Besides journalists, forensics experts and the sheriff and her men, locals had crowded around the area, which meant footprints were everywhere.
What else?
Dani spent an hour more, taking in as many tiny details as she could, from the awkward angle at which a twig was bent to the consistency of the soil. At the end of the hour, however, she didn’t think she had a single clue.
Giving up, she decided to go back home.
She was planning to head back into the kitchen and eat something more substantial than the apple she’d nicked on the way out but, as she approached the door, she heard Caroline and Martin.
“You still have feelings for him, don’t you?” Martin was asking. His voice was a low hiss. “That’s the real reason you want to put off the wedding. At least admit it, Caroline.”
“That’s not true!” Caroline exclaimed.
“Jess told me, you know,” Martin said. “The week before I asked you to remove her from our invitation list, she confronted me and told me I’m standing between you and your happiness. I’ve tried to ignore it as much as I could. But I saw the way you were looking at him yesterday. You were frozen, Caroline. There’s something about him that still arrests you. How could it not? He’s tall and good looking and successful and he was the first man you ever kissed.”
“No,” Caroline said. “He was the first boy I ever kissed. You were the first man, Martin.”
That stopped him. He moved closer to her. Caroline took his hands in hers and said, “I’m sorry, Martin. I never wanted Jess to die, but she was nothing short of cruel to you. She made you so insecure about my love for you.”
“It was easy,” Martin said. “Because there’s a grain of truth in whatever she said to me. You were the golden couple. You were destined to be together and I came out of nowhere. Are you sure that I wasn’t just a rebound, Caroline? You’d just broken up with him when we first met.”
“Yes,” Caroline said. “I’m sure that I love you.”
“So, is all this moving too fast for you?” Martin asked. “I don’t want you to be with me out of… out of obligation or something. Break up with me anytime you want to. I’d rather live with the heartache than with a lie.”
“It isn’t a lie,” Caroline said softly. “Martin. I might have known Leo all my life but, by the time I met you, I felt nothing for him. Not a shred of emotion.”
Martin hesitated.
“There was something Jess didn’t know,” Caroline said. “Something that nobody knows about Leo, except me.” Her voice was trembling a little, now.
“What was it?” Martin asked.
“Before I tell you, I want you to promise that you’ll never tell anyone,” Caroline said. “I also want you to promise that you won’t do anything stupid. You won’t try and pick a fight with him.”
“I can’t promise you that,” Martin said.
“Then I can’t tell you,” Caroline was firm.
“Fine! I promise,” Martin exclaimed. “What is it?”
Caroline bit her lip. “I told you that I had no shred of feeling for him. The truth is, for the longest of time, I believed exactly what Jess did. That he and I were destined to be together. He helped me when I went through my rebellious phase, he stood by me when my mother vanished. He did and does mean a lot to me. But he had his own problems. Tons of them. His father was an alcoholic, and Leo had his tendency to drink too much and to get into fights.” She paused, “I don’t know how to tell you this next part.”
“Just spit it out,” Martin said gently. “Don’t worry about how you tell it.”
“Promise you won’t be mad at me?” Caroline asked.
For a moment, Martin didn’t say anything, then, softly, “Promise.”
“Leo and I were always on-again, off-again. Mostly, we’d fight when he did stupid things like drink too much, flirt with other women or get into bar fights. I grew up, but part of him just didn’t. He was stuck in a self destructive spiral.”
“He seems fine to me.”
“He’s improved,” Caroline said. “The last time we fought, the very last time we broke up, I think that scared him straight. But it was too late for us. I could never forgive him for what he did. From that moment on, any love I had for him, any dreams of making him my husband, they all evaporated.”
“What did-” Martin stuttered. “Caroline, you’re scaring me. What did he do?”
“He got drunk,” Caroline said, with tears in her eyes. “He came to see me, when he was drunk. Snuck in through the window. Dad was out of town that day.”
Martin’s face was a mask of horr
or. “This was right before we met, you said?”
“Right,” Caroline nodded with a smile. “So you’ve guessed what happened, then.”
“I still want to hear it,” Martin said. “All of it.”
“He was furious when I said I wanted to break up,” Caroline said. “I told him I loved him dearly, but I couldn’t handle his drinking anymore. He tried to hold my hand, tried to stop me from leaving the room. He was drunk, Martin, and he didn’t really mean it but it hurt anyway. He broke my arm.”
Martin’s face was a mask of sorrow and rage. His fists were clenched together. “You had a broken arm when we met. You told me it was an accident.”
“It was an accident,” Caroline said. “I know what you must think of him, but it was an accident.”
“How can you defend him?!”
“Because of our past,” Caroline said. “I’m telling you, I grew up with him. He helped me when my mother vanished. I owed him something. I couldn’t press charges. In a way, he did me a favor. When he broke my arm, my feelings disappeared forever. I knew I could never love him again. He begged me to come back so many times after that but, this time, my no was final. He changed, too. He hasn’t drunk a drop since that day. But it was no use. Our relationship was dead.”
“He will be dead, too. I’ll kill him,” Martin said. “Right now. I’m going to kill him.”
“Martin-no-!” Caroline protested. “Please- you’re the only one I’ve ever told this to. I never even told Jess. I don’t want anything to do with him anymore but I don’t want his life ruined either, Martin.”
“I don’t care. I’m going to kill him!” Martin insisted. “He hurt you!”
“You promised, Martin, you-”
Whatever Caroline said to him, Dani didn’t hear. Her ears were ringing. Her sister. Her Caroline. That giant jerk had laid a hand on her darling Caro. Dani’s stomach was tied in knots and every drop of blood in her body was boiling with rage. Martin may have promised not to hurt Leo, but she hadn’t made any such promises.
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