“Into your personal life?” She picked at something on her shirt. “I don’t know. It seems fair to me, Sam. You want to know all my secrets. I get to know all of yours.”
He tapped harder, jamming his fingertips into the wood. “That’s not how this works.”
She giggled. “You need my story, Sam. You’ll lose your advance otherwise. And it’s not so bad. I’m not going to do anything with your secrets. I’m not going to tell anyone. I just want to know. It makes me feel like we’re even. Okay?”
What? How did she know about his advance? Did she know everything about him? He didn’t like this—not one bit. He didn’t trust Lola. There was something about her, something that made him feel attacked. She got under his skin. He couldn’t figure out why she was so interested in him, but he didn’t think it was benign. It was easy to suspect the worst about Lola. Far too easy.
Lola dug a pack of cigarettes out of her purse. “I’m going outside for a smoke.”
Sam looked at the cigarettes and his throat started to hurt—a clenching craving. He stood up. “Can I have one of those?”
She raised her eyebrows. “I didn’t think you smoked.”
He shrugged.
She pulled her coat on over her sweater. “Come on.”
Outside the restaurant, they huddled around the glowing tips of the cigarettes.
Lola blew out smoke, and it wreathed her face like a halo. “Why would you accuse me of that, Sam?”
“Of what?” The cigarette tasted good, and Sam felt guilty for asking for it.
“Of deliberately setting you up to get into an argument with Daphne?”
He wasn’t sure what to say.
“You don’t have any reason to think I don’t like you, do you?”
No. Now that he thought about it, it seemed ludicrous. Lola had no reason to try to make his life difficult. He wasn’t sure why he’d immediately jumped to the conclusion that she’d orchestrated the entire incident. Probably, it was because Lola seemed scheming and manipulative. It was in the way she carried herself, the way she talked, the way she smoked, the way she swung her hips.
Lola tapped ash off her cigarette. “You’re the same as the rest of them.”
He sucked down smoke. “What do you mean?”
“You said you’d be on my side, but you aren’t,” she said. “No one ever has been. People get ideas in their heads about me. I don’t know why it is. I think it’s because there’s not enough room in people’s brains for a girl like me.”
Sam raised his eyebrows. He didn’t understand.
“People are okay with the idea of an innocent little girl who’s been terrorized by a monster,” she said. “But if that little girl wasn’t so innocent? Well, then, she must be a monster too. Right?”
Sam studied his shoes. She was right. He was inferring that Lola’s personality made her a killer. But it only made her brash and a little sexy. Damn. It was like that literature class he’d taken junior year of college, when his professor had drilled the virgin/whore dichotomy into his skull. In literature, women were either good or bad, no middle ground. “Sorry,” he muttered.
“No, it’s okay,” said Lola. “I’m used to it.”
He raised his gaze to meet hers. “So, was Nicholas Todd your boyfriend?”
She winced. She turned in a circle, looking around. “Is there a trash can or something for the cigarette butts?”
“Lola,” he said in a soft voice. “You can’t hide this stuff. If you want to tell the truth, you have to tell all of it.”
She dropped the cigarette and ground it out with her foot. “Nick killed my parents. He killed them in front of me. He bashed my mother’s skull in. She screamed. She kept screaming.” Her mouth twisted. “I don’t want to talk about this yet.” She turned on her heel and strode back into the restaurant.
*
“Yeah, he was her boyfriend,” said Nissa. She was sitting on the other side of a booth in the pub she’d asked him to meet her in, the recorder on the table between them. “I mean, as much as a twelve-year-old can even have a boyfriend. I didn’t know Lola then, so I can only go by what she told me. But I guess it was hard for her to see him. When her parents found out about him, they freaked.”
“That’s understandable, though. He was eleven years older than she was. And I’ve seen pictures of the way he looked. It’s enough to make any parent go into protective mode. Plus, you know, she was a kid.”
“Well, definitely,” said Nissa. “And obviously, after what happened, no one regrets getting involved with him more than Lola, you know? She was playing with fire, and she didn’t know it. I think that’s a pretty common thing for girls to do.”
At the mention of fire and girls, Sam couldn’t help but think of coughing up smoke and pulling Hannah through flames. He fiddled with the napkin holder on the table, afraid that Nissa would see the change in his expression.
“It’s not always so extreme, of course,” said Nissa. “But… well, I kind of did it too, but not in such an extreme way. I remember when I was maybe thirteen years old, and this was before I met Lola, right?”
Sam nodded, still trying to shake the image of Hannah’s dead body. He forced himself to focus on what she was saying.
“Well, anyway, I went out shopping with friends. I think our parents dropped us off at the mall or something. And I bought this bra. This really padded, push-up bra. And it really made me look like I was a lot more mature than I was. Which was the whole point, right?”
Wait. Had he missed something? Did this have something to do with Lola?
“Anyway, I wore it to school, with a low-cut shirt, to show off. And I had to hide it from my parents, because they would have flipped out. But I didn’t understand why they would have flipped out. I thought they were angry that I was growing up and that they were trying to keep me a little girl forever. Anyway, it was awful, wearing that bra, because all day at school, boys acted weird around me. They couldn’t stop staring at me. They snickered to each other. They came up to me and made comments about my ‘knockers’ and my ‘jugs.’ They acted like they had some kind of ownership of my body, all of the sudden. Just because they could see it. And all of them did it, especially really scuzzy, gross boys. I didn’t even want to think about those boys as sexual beings. It was a horrible experience.” She eyed Sam. “You probably wouldn’t understand, I guess.”
Sam felt uncomfortable, as if she’d accused him of something. But maybe she was only saying it because he was a man, not because she could look inside him and see all his dark, shameful wants and fantasies. He flashed on Hannah winking at him, looking over one bare shoulder. He felt sick.
“The thing is,” said Nissa, “all girls want to be more grown up than they are, so they try it. But they’re too young to know how to handle it. I wasn’t prepared for all the attention I’d get when I wore that bra. I wasn’t prepared to deal with the way I was treated. And Lola wasn’t ready to have a boyfriend, so she picked a really bad one. She wanted an older guy. What girl that age doesn’t? Twelve-year-old boys look like, well, boys. But what she didn’t understand was that any adult guy who would be in a relationship with a girl her age had something wrong with him.”
He supposed that made sense. “So, she fell for the wrong guy.”
“Yeah,” said Nissa.
“Well, most people would understand that. Why would Lola hide that? Why wouldn’t she have come clean during Todd’s trial?”
“I think she was scared,” said Nissa. “You’d have to ask her, of course. I wasn’t there.”
“She doesn’t want to talk about this stuff yet,” said Sam.
“Look,” said Nissa, “when she finally got a chance to get free and call the police, she’d seen like six people get brutally murdered. And then the police are asking her questions, and she’s hardly able to talk. So, they start giving her their theories to confirm or deny. They theorized that Todd was a stranger to her. She confirmed it. And once she’d done that, she couldn’t go b
ack on her word without looking like a liar.”
“Maybe I can see that,” said Sam. “But it still doesn’t look good for her. Because if Todd was telling the truth about that, then maybe he was telling the truth about other things too.”
Nissa snorted. “Like that Lola told him to kill her parents?”
“That’s what he says.”
“You talk to him recently or something?”
“Actually, yes, I visited him in jail.”
“Oh.” Nissa nodded. “So he’s still saying it was all her idea, then.”
“He does.”
“Well, that’s not true,” said Nissa. “Lola didn’t want her parents to be killed. She didn’t want that to happen at all. She might have been a little bit rebellious back then, but that doesn’t mean that she wanted to lose her mom and dad, right? She was miserable in foster care. She missed her parents every single day.”
Sam made a tent with his fingers and rested his chin against it. “So she had a relationship with this man, but no one saw it.”
Nissa furrowed her brow. “What you saying?”
“There are no witnesses that could prove they were together.”
“Sure there were,” said Nissa. “People saw them together. She talked about meeting Nick’s friends sometimes.”
“But none of them testified,” he said.
“Well, if they had, they would have been on Nick’s side,” said Nissa. “And I think most people must have understood that he was guilty, and there was no point in muddying things up.”
*
Sam was making a playlist for his book on Lola. He was auditioning tracks on Spotify, trying to figure out which ones would be perfect to listen to while he was writing. He wasn’t ready to write or anything. Not yet. But he was pretty sure that he’d gotten the basic outline of the story. He liked it. It revealed Lola as a rebellious teen, but still very much a victim. Her motivations seemed clear. She’d tried to grow up too fast, and that was really her only crime. It would make a good book.
He was becoming rather fond of Lola, in a strange way. She still made him uncomfortable, but he was getting used to it. And he thought that he was slowly starting to understand her.
That was his favorite part of writing his books. The point at which he really understood the subject of the book, where he felt as if he lived inside her head. He needed to be her, consume her, know everything she knew. And Lola was right. When he did that, he inevitably fell in love with the girl he was interviewing.
It had happened during every book he’d written. But the first book had been about Melody Lynch, and she was married—happily married. There had been some pretty intense flirting, and Mel’s husband had sort of stopped liking him by the time he was done writing the draft. But nothing physical had actually happened.
And then with Daphne, well…
He’d been so convinced that what he felt for Daphne would consume him forever. That his feelings for her were so all-encompassing, it would be impossible to have feelings for anyone else. Love was overwhelming like that, or so he’d thought.
So he hadn’t even been concerned when he started interviewing Rachel Fletcher for the book. Rachel was different than Daphne. Daphne had gotten through her ordeal and come out stronger. Rachel had been destroyed by it. Rachel hadn’t been strong to begin with.
It was her weakness that stirred something inside him, he thought. Rachel needed him. He was compelled to protect her, to keep her safe. How fucking her factored into keeping her safe, he wasn’t exactly sure.
There was something wrong with him.
He liked to think that he was a normal sort of guy, with normal sorts of feelings, normal sorts of attractions. But after he’d completely destroyed his perfect marriage with Daphne over fluttery-little-bird Rachel and her white skin and tiny wrists…
Normal people didn’t do things like that. Normal people had happy marriages with women they were in love with, and they were faithful to those women.
If normal people cheated, it was because they were unhappy. Something would be wrong with their relationships. Maybe they were dissatisfied because their wives nagged at them. Maybe they were annoyed because there was a lack of sex. Hell, maybe they just got annoyed when their wives gained weight. Normal people might be shallow or horrible, but they had reasons.
Sam felt more like a heroin addict.
It wasn’t that he was addicted to sex or anything. He’d read all about sex addiction, and how people debased themselves chasing orgasms. That wasn’t him. It wasn’t about sex. It was about…
The thing was that Rachel was all pathetic and needy and sweet and hurt and small. The thing was that Sam wanted that. Needed that.
Took that.
Had to take it. Felt driven to take it. Felt crazy and out of control until he did.
He searched Spotify for INXS’s “Devil Inside.” He thought that was an appropriate song for the book. It was also an appropriate song for how he felt about himself.
His phone rang.
He grabbed it off his desk.
It was Daphne.
She was calling him? She never called him. She hadn’t voluntarily made contact with him in—
He picked up the phone. “Hey.”
“Hi Sam.” She’d been crying. He could hear it in her voice.
He got up, holding the phone tight to his ear. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Defensive. She took a deep breath. “I looked her up. Lola Ward.”
Okay. Sam waited.
“Are you fucking her?”
“No,” he said. “I’m writing about her. That’s all.”
“Shouldn’t matter.” And her voice was full of tears again. “I shouldn’t care. We’re done, you and me. But, for some reason, it bothers me.”
“There’s nothing going on with her.” And then he had a flash of the sway of Lola’s hips, and he felt like a liar.
“I don’t want you with anyone else, Sam,” she said.
“I’m not with anyone else.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” said Daphne, and he could hear that she was crying again, crying hard. “I left you. I hate you. You’re not part of me anymore. So why do I care if you’re with someone?”
“I’m not with someone.”
“Maybe… maybe the way I feel means something?”
He took a breath. A sharp breath. “You think so?” He didn’t dare to hope.
“I don’t know.” Daphne let out a soft sob. “I know you cut stuff off with Rachel. I know you wouldn’t interview her alone anymore. And I know you were… trying.”
“I was an ass, Daphne,” he said. “I should never have… You don’t know how sorry I am. I can’t possibly explain how bad I feel—”
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“Okay.” He wasn’t sure why she didn’t want him to apologize, but he’d do whatever she wanted.
“Look, all I’m saying is that if I don’t want you with other people, that must mean some part of me still wants you.”
He started to pace. He’d wanted her to say this for so long.
“Maybe we could… I don’t know. Maybe if you wanted to try to meet and talk?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I want that. When? Where? I can get in the car and drive—”
“Wait,” she said. “Not right this second.”
But if they waited, she might change her mind. He needed to be close to her. He needed to try to find some way to let her see him the way she used to. But he couldn’t push. She wouldn’t like it if he pushed. “Okay.”
“And if you’re serious… well, then, you’d have to stop writing that book.”
He stopped pacing. “What?”
“Look, I couldn’t handle it, okay?” she said. “I’d be suspicious, and it would make everything unravel.”
“Writing books is what I do, Daphne. I can’t stop writing books—”
“I’m not saying you could never write another book,” she said. “But I am
saying that you’d need to make a choice. Me or Lola Ward. You can’t have both of us.”
He rubbed his forehead. “Daphne, if I back out of that book, I lose my advance, and I might never get another book contract again. I’ll get a reputation as a difficult writer. No one’s going to work with someone like that.”
“Well, I guess you’d have to decide how much I’m worth to you, Sam.” There was a defiant tilt to her voice.
He sat down hard in his desk chair. He looked at the Spotify playlist. “I wouldn’t have any money, Daphne.”
“It’s not like I don’t have a job, you know,” she said. “And if things worked out, if we managed to make it work, then you could try writing another book. You’re a good writer, Sam, and you made that publisher a lot of money. Money trumps ‘difficult’ any day.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “I…” The truth was that he didn’t want to give up the Lola Ward book. And not because of the way she swayed her hips, but because of the fact that he thought he was onto something big here. He wanted to write this book, to uncover this mystery.
“If you need to think about it—”
“No,” he said. “I’ll call Petra. I’ll tell her the book’s off. When it’s done, can I call you back? Will we set up a time to meet?”
“You’ll really do that?”
“Yeah,” he said. Normal people recognized that books didn’t keep you warm at night, that books didn’t go out for happy hour drinks for you, that books weren’t wives, damn it. Daphne was more important to him than writing. Love was the most important thing.
Wasn’t that how normal people felt?
Sam wanted to be a normal person.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“Anything for you, baby.”
She didn’t tell him not to call her that.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Oh, God, Sam, you would not believe how excited they are over at MacphersonConnell about this Lola Ward book,” said Petra, her voice bubbly on the other side of the phone. MacphersonConnell was his publisher
Sam was deleting songs off the Spotify playlist. “Listen, Petra, about that. I’m actually calling because something’s come up.”
The Girl on the Stairs Page 5
