“Mom? Can I?”
She looked up. Jason was staring at her, Scrabble tiles in his hand and a concerned look on his face. Game over, she and Jason were putting the game away while Val and Riley loaded the dishwasher. Somehow, over the years, she’d become mom instead of sister—a natural progression of time and the love they both felt for her.
“What’s up, kiddo?”
“I asked if I could use the car this weekend,” Jason said, tossing the handful of tiles into the box. “I asked Staci Greene to the movies.”
“Ohhh, the infamous Staci with an i,” she said, and Jason blushed. He was a good-looking kid with hair a few shades darker that his twin sister’s auburn color. Where Riley’s heart-shaped face was finely boned, Jason’s was more masculine, his features a bit broader. But they both had the most heartbreaking blue eyes Sabrina had ever seen. Sometimes looking into them was hard, but she did it now, ignoring the twinge of fear she felt in her gut.
“Yeah, Mom, Staci with an i … so, can I?”
Her hand found the lapis band around her neck and squeezed. The look of concern on Jason’s face deepened into a scowl.
“Mom, are you okay?”
She smiled again, quickly averting her eyes, concentrating instead on folding the game board and placing it in the box. Jason had always been the sensitive one. He noticed things.
“Fine.” She nodded. “I’m fine, kiddo. Long day, that’s all. If you can wrestle the keys from your sister’s iron grip, then I don’t have a problem with it.” She arched an eyebrow at him and narrowed her eyes. “You do understand that I expect you to treat Miss Staci with an i with respect, right?”
“Mom.”
“Just sayin’,” she said with a shrug.
“I understand. Besides, getting the keys from Ry won’t be hard. She has a date,” Jason said in a sly tone that had Sabrina’s head jerking up.
“A date. Riley has a date? With who?”
Jason cast a quick glance at the door connecting the kitchen and dining room to assure they weren’t overheard.
“Jimmy Bradshaw.”
“Jimmy? Little League Jimmy? Braceface Jimmy?” She felt marginally better.
“He’s nose ring, blue mohawk Jimmy these days. Anyway, he asked her out.” Jason didn’t seem pleased, and truthfully, neither was she.
He killed my sister …
Worry gnawed at her. Somehow she’d managed to delude herself into thinking that even though he was still out there, the man who kidnapped and tortured her had stopped with her. That he hadn’t hurt anyone else. Michael was right—she was smarter than that. “Would I be completely terrible if I asked you to push for a group outing rather than a one-on-one thing?”
Jason looked reluctant. “Me and Jimmy don’t exactly hang anymore.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He got all weird after he didn’t make varsity last year.” Jason put the cardboard top on the game box and put it away.
“Sounds like he needs a good friend.”
Jason laughed and shook his head. “My mom—the gun-toting humanitarian.”
“Jason.”
He rolled his eyes at her but softened it with a smile, “Okay, okay—I get it. I’ll talk to him tomorrow, see if he’s down with it.”
“Thanks, kiddo.” She leaned over and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. When she pulled back, he was giving her that look again.
“I know something’s wrong. You always do that when you’re upset,” Jason said, jamming his hands into the pockets of his jeans.
“Do what?”
“Hold on to your necklace.”
She looked down. Her hand was wrapped into a fist on her chest, the lapis band clutched tight. She hadn’t even realized she was doing it. She looked up to give Jason a half-hearted smile and a lame excuse, but she found herself alone.
18
Michael let himself into his room and locked the door before taking a quick look around. Other than fresh sheets and clean towels, the room was untouched.
He stooped and pulled out the case, set it on the bed. He punched several buttons on the coded keypad and popped its top. Guns. Laptop. Prepaid cells. Cash and documents. He bypassed it all and pulled out his binocs. He took the chair from the small writing desk and set it in front of the window before retrieving the bottle of Glenfiddich from the dresser.
Sabrina didn’t believe him. She didn’t trust him—had no reason to. Goddamn it, he’d come at her straight on, been honest, and she’d flat out refused to help him. She was the beginning, the point from which all roads led. Way he saw it, she was the reason girls were dying.
And she didn’t care.
He wasn’t surprised, though. Not really. He’d dismissed everything he’d been told about her. Lucy warned him she was different. Not just the way she looked, that she was different, but he hadn’t believed her.
A person couldn’t change who they were. They could break habits and make conscious decisions that altered their behavior, but deep down, they were still same the person. No one knew that better than him, but she was different.
What had been done to her changed her on a fundamental level. It’d killed the sweet, naive girl she’d been and left a stranger in her place. A stranger who didn’t give a shit about anyone or anything but herself. A far cry from the girl he remembered. He’d barely known Melissa back then beyond good looks, but she’d been kind and quick to smile—compassionate, like her grandmother. Thinking about Lucy tied his stomach in knots.
Taking the bottle with him, he settled into the chair he’d placed in front of the window and broke the seal with his teeth. To hell with it, he thought. Promise keeping had never been his strong suit anyway. He wedged the open bottle between his knees and lifted the field glasses to his face, seeing her almost instantly.
She was on her back porch, a file folder in her lap and a borrowed dog at her feet. He imagined the file was full of whatever information she’d managed to scrape together about him. It wouldn’t be much. Everything since he’d joined the Army was well beyond her reach. The set of her shoulders suddenly stiffened. She raised her head and stared across the yard, in his direction.
She knew he was there. Her eyes scanned the back of the house he hid in and settled on each of the windows for a few moments before she flipped the bird in his general direction and mouthed the words fuck you.
He cracked a half-smile and lifted the bottle, tipped it in her direction. “Right back at you,” he said out loud, but he didn’t take a drink. Melissa was long gone. There was no way the woman she’d become was going to help him. Not willingly.
He checked his watch. It was just past seven. Jessup was a few hours ahead, so he should have heard from Tom long before now. He couldn’t decide if the fact that he hadn’t was good news or bad.
19
She poured a glass of wine and took it—and O’Shea’s painfully thin arrest file—out onto the deck. There were eighteen pieces of paper inside. She counted them, put them in chronological order. Read them and reread them. According to his file, he’d run away when he was thirteen. Just disappeared without a trace.
He’d been found almost a year later, OD’d on heroin in the closet of some shitty rent-by-the-hour motel. She found the missing persons report and reread it. His foster mother filed the report in Jessup. The police chief, Billy Bauer, had filed it himself.
Sabrina took a deep breath. Billy Bauer was her father. Her mother, Kelly, had been fifteen and beautiful, with a reputation that kept her hip-deep in trouble. Billy had been older, newly married, with a baby on the way. Little Melissa Walker was born a year and four months after Billy’s son, Wade.
Kelly had taken one look at the baby and decided motherhood wasn’t for her. She dropped her in Lucy’s arms and walked away. Lucy took her in, and they moved away to Marshal, far from Jessup and the ugliness of schoolroom gossip. The pair visited the Jessup community every Sunday, though, to attend Lucy’s lifelong church, and she’d felt the sting of b
eing excluded.
None of that had really bothered her. She was raised with love. Did well in school. She worked hard to be all the things her mother wasn’t. She lived to make her grandmother proud, tried to do the right thing. Which is why, when she was fifteen and Kelly showed up on their doorstep, claiming to have had a change of heart, she listened.
It wasn’t the words that got her—they were all lies—it was the fact that Kelly was pregnant again. And so at fifteen, she agreed to leave the life that Lucy had given her. Not because she wanted to, but because she knew the babies Kelly was carrying wouldn’t survive without her. She’d moved back to Jessup for them.
Sabrina shoved the useless pieces of paper back into their folder and set it aside. She picked up her wine and took a drink, pushed her bare feet under the dog that lay at the foot of her chaise. He groaned, rolling his eyes to look at her.
“I didn’t ask you to stage a prison break, you know. I’m aiding and abetting, here. The least you can do is keep my feet warm.” Noodles licked her ankle.
She was cold but refused to go inside, even for a moment. O’Shea was watching her. She could feel it. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of thinking she ran from him. Nearly an acre of land separated her deck from the back of the Brewster place, a three-story Victorian much like her own. Her eyes scanned the windows that dotted the second and third floors. A few were lighted, but most were dark. O’Shea was behind one of them, she was sure of it. She gave into her fear and frustration and flipped the bird in the general direction of the Brewster place and mouthed the words fuck you. Childish, but it felt good anyway.
The porch light snapped on.
She craned her neck around to see Val standing in the open doorway.
Ding, ding—round two. “Hey.”
Val stood where she was for a second before coming toward her. She dropped a pair of socks and a sweatshirt into her lap.
“I know you’d rather freeze than come inside when you’ve got a class-A brood going on,” Val said.
She shot a look across the yard before she understood. Val thought she was refusing to come in because they were fighting. “I’m not brooding. I’m thinking.” She pulled on the socks.
“Same diff.” Val sat down on the chaise across from her and looked at the dog. “Dog-napping again, I see?”
She tugged the sweatshirt down over her chest. “He ’napped himself—what am I supposed to do?”
“Fill in the tunnel he dug behind the hydrangeas?”
“Did you really come out here to fight with me about the neighbor’s dog?”
Val sighed. She picked up Sabrina’s wine and drank the last of it. “No. I came out here as an exercise in futility.”
“Uh-oh—in that case I’m gonna need more wine.” She stood, but Val’s hand shot out and gripped her wrist. She gave it a tug, but her friend held firm. Val was the only person who could get away with grabbing her like that without consequence, and they both knew it. Val pulled her back down until she was once again sitting across from her, but she didn’t let go.
“Something’s going on. Don’t bother lying—you’re terrible at it.”
She pulled a hurt look. “I happen to be an excellent liar.”
“Not when it comes to me.”
She yanked her arm out of Val’s grip and settled back into her seat. “I got tossed off the job today for that shit that went down with Sanford.” She pinned the blame on him without guilt. There was no need to tell Val she skipped out on her psych sessions.
“Is that why he was here?”
“You saw that?” So much for flying below radar.
“Yeah, I saw that. I also saw the guy you were talking to after he left. Who was he?” Val asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Some guy walking by who happened to catch the show.” There was no need to get Val riled up. She could handle O’Shea on her own.
Val wasn’t buying it. “Who was he, Sabrina?” I wish I knew.
“I told you, just some guy.”
“You looked pretty angry for someone who was talking to just some random guy.”
“I was angry. I had to chase Sanford off our front lawn at gunpoint,” she said, but Val just stared at her. Frustration and fear had kept her stretched thin all day. She finally snapped. “What do you want from me?” She threw her arms in the air, practically shouting.
“The truth. For once, goddamn it, tell me the truth,” Val said, her voice just as loud.
Sabrina’s mouth snapped shut, and they glared at each other. Tears stung her eyes. She ignored them. “The truth … okay. The truth is, fifteen years ago today, the girl I used to be was kidnapped. For eighty-two days she was raped and tortured. For eighty-two days, things were done to her that I will never talk about. And then on the eighty-third day, she was murdered.” She swallowed hard, shoving memories and emotions aside. “Melissa is gone. She’s dead, and I’m all that’s left. I can’t be her. I won’t be her. Not for you—not for anybody, so … if you can’t handle that, then you should just leave.” It was the most she’d ever talked about her disappearance. For a moment, all Val could do was stare at her.
Then Val shook her head. “You know what? Fuck you.” She stood and glared down at her. “We’re in this together, you and me. I don’t run. You taught me that. You—not Melissa. I know who you are and who you aren’t, so you can take your lone-wolf speech and shove it up your ass.” Val walked back into the house and slammed the door shut behind her.
20
Michael was certain she’d cancel her standing date with the law student. He was surprised when the flood light she had set on a motion sensor clicked on and he caught sight of him trotting his ass up the third-story landing on the side of the house. The kid straightened his shirt and knocked on the exterior door leading to her bedroom. He was holding something … Christ, are those flowers?
“You’ve gotta be kidding.” He glanced at his watch—eleven o’clock. Right on time. When she answered the door, they got down to business. Five minutes later the bedroom light clicked off, leaving only the bathroom light to see by. The bed, and what was going on in it, was thankfully cast in shadows.
The phone on his hip let out a chirp. It was Tom. “Did you call Carson? What did he say?”
Tom was quiet for a second. He cleared his throat. “I can’t find him. Looked high and low. He’s nowhere to be found,” Tom said.
“What? What do you mean you can’t find him?”
“I mean, I can’t find him. I tried the station, his house, every bar and roadhouse between here and Marshall. Hell, I even checked his parents’ house. He’s gone.”
The hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up. Jed Carson was gone, and so was Lucy. This was it, the proof he needed: justification to kill Carson.
“What about Wade? Zeke?” he said, mentioning Carson’s uniformed officers.
“Zeke’s at the station, holding down the fort. I harassed him into driving out to Lucy’s place with me.”
“And?”
“Nothing. He went inside, said everything looked fine, neat as a pin. No signs of a struggle, no signs of a robbery. He’s convinced she went to Shreveport—hell, it’s even marked on her calendar. Said if we don’t hear from her in a couple of days, he’d file a missing person’s report.”
“A couple of days? What the hell kind of good is that going to do? She’s in trouble, Tom, I don’t give a shit what her calendar says. I know it,” he said, his tone hard and even. “What about Wade? You find him?”
“Wade’s gone too.”
Both of them? What the fuck was going on? Before he could ask, Tom pushed on. “I talked to Shelly. She said Wade left for work this morning as soon as she got home from the hospital. From what Zeke would tell me, he sent her a text around noon saying that he and Carson were headed up to Caddo to do some fishing.” Shelly, Wade’s wife, was a pediatric nurse at Good Shepherd in Marshall. And she was pregnant with their first child. No way Wade just disappears on her lik
e that. Not without a good reason.
“Fishing? They just loaded up the poles on a random Monday and skipped town? Bullshit.” That Wade was also gone meant nothing. He and Jed had been best friends since grade school. Wade followed Jed around like a puppy. He’d do anything Jed said—no questions asked. Even if it involved dumping Lucy’s body in Caddo Lake.
“It’s hardly a random Monday. For any of us,” Tom said.
He was right. From what Tom had told him, Carson had lost it when Melissa disappeared. He’d come home from college and never went back. “I still don’t buy it,” he said stubbornly. “Why not tell Zeke or Shelly they were leaving? Whatever they’re doing, wherever they went, they didn’t want anyone to know until they were already gone.”
“Yeah, well, unfortunately, if you’re going to accuse the police chief of murder and his number one of offering a false alibi, you’re gonna need more than a gut feeling.” Tom’s voice was tight with anger. “When are you coming back? I’m probably gonna need help strong-arming Zeke into filing that missing person’s if Lucy doesn’t show up soon.”
Lucy. He was torn between his need to get back to Jessup and the promise he made her.
“I’m on a job … I can’t leave for a few days.” At least. He’d promised Lucy he’d stay the entire month, but if anything happened to her, all bets were off. “Besides, I’m the last person Zeke is gonna listen to.” How many times had Zeke tossed his ass in the back of his squad car and taken him to the station to sleep it off? Hauled him up the front porch steps at three a.m. to turn him over to an angry Sophia and worried Sean? Too many to count. Zeke knew him too well to take anything he had to say seriously.
“We need to find Carson,” Tom said.
“Caddo Lake State Park is almost a thousand square miles of wetland, Tom. If he is there, we ain’t finding him.” The frustration he felt had him raising the bottle to his mouth, but he lowered it without taking a drink. “Our best bet is to look for Lucy. Do you know where her sister lives?” He knew he was grasping at straws. Lucy wasn’t at her sister’s; Lucy was dead, but he couldn’t give up on her. Not yet.
The Sabrina Vaughn series Set 1 Page 10
