by Helena Maeve
The one thing they wouldn’t do was put me in touch with the one person alive who might have been able to relate to what I was going through—my brother.
I didn’t recognize Harry as I stepped through the doors of the diner. It was too early for the steakhouse, so we’d agreed on a substitute measure, a hole in the wall he liked, not far from his dad’s house. I parked across the street and stayed in my car for a good five minutes before I could work up the nerve to move.
My head was pounding, a migraine threatening to spill out from behind my eyes into the rest of my body. The last time I’d seen Harry, he’d been a ruddy-faced two year old in blue overalls. The man who rose from behind the only occupied table in the diner bore only faint resemblance to that child.
“Laure?” he asked, soft and twangy, his accent the same as Kane’s.
I nodded.
I don’t know who moved first, me or him, but suddenly we were hugging, his arms around my shoulders and mine wrapped tightly around his gangly torso.
“Aw, you didn’t tell me you had a girlfriend, Law,” the waitress crowed.
Harry pulled back, cheeks pinking. “She’s my sister. Here,” he told me, “sit down. I already got us coffee…”
“You were that sure I’d show up?” I had to admire his faith in me.
He shrugged a shoulder. “I was hoping. God, it’s so good to see you.” He laughed and I laughed with him, blinking back the tears that seemed to cling stubbornly to my lashes. I was suddenly relieved that I hadn’t put on any mascara—a sentiment that persisted for a single second before Harry said, “You look just like Mom.”
“I do?” Kane had said something similar, but from Harry it couldn’t be a mindfuck. Him, I believed.
“Yeah… I mean, I don’t remember her very well, but Dad has pictures all over the house.”
A shard of envy sliced through me. Grandmother had packed all of my mother’s belongings and hidden them away, out of sight and out of mind.
The waitress deposited two laminated menus in front of us. “Y’know, now I that I think about it, you do look kind of similar.” She cocked her head at me. “How come I never see you around?”
“I…live out of state.”
“Paw must love that,” she sniggered. “Waffles’re pretty good.”
Harry sucked his lips into his mouth, but didn’t correct the assumption that we shared a father. “Have you eaten yet?”
I had, but I was so eager for Harry’s company that I ordered the waffles anyway. Once we were alone, I reached across the table and covered his hand with mine. “So which is it? Harry or Lawrence?” The emails I’d gotten from him over the years—usually comprised of little more than polite, frosty well wishes—alternated between the two.
He flashed me a grin. “Lawrence, mostly.”
“Very cool.”
“Yeah?” His cheeks dimpled when he smiled. “It’s not just because of Mom. I like it better. And Dad’s always called me Lawrence, so…”
I nodded like I understood what it was like to care what your parents thought about something as important as your identity.
“What brings you to Topeka?” my brother pressed. “Bit of a way from—Paris?”
“It’s a long story.”
Lawrence grinned. “I’ve got time.” He might have believed I looked like Mom, but he was the one who had her smile.
I told him about Barnes’ calls and his request, and how eventually I’d realized I should at least make an effort. I left out the part where I was falling in and out of relationships with men I barely knew at precisely the same time. As his big sister I figured I should retain some illusion of moral authority.
“Guessing it didn’t go so well,” Lawrence ventured.
“It didn’t. Kane just wanted to see me… And he did.” Recounting my journey from Leavenworth was a distraction from the frustration I felt when I thought about my father winning yet again. “I remembered something last night,” I told Lawrence while we wolfed our way through the waffles.
Skinny as he was, he practically scarfed down his breakfast. I gave him half of mine, suddenly overtaken with the strange urge to make sure he ate his fill. I was perfectly content not possessing a single maternal bone in my body, but something about having my brother around awakened those dormant instincts.
“Remembered what?” Lawrence prompted between bites.
“I think I know what Kane isn’t telling. I think Donna Barnes is buried in the back yard of our old house.”
Lawrence froze mid-chew. “Shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Have you gone to the police?”
I’d considered it this morning, but I had no solid evidence and twenty years later I doubted any self-respecting detective would be interested in reopening the case on account of my resurgent memories. “I thought I’d check it out myself.”
My brother set knife and fork down and leaned back in his seat, the red vinyl crackling like static. “You sure that’s wise? I mean, people around here have been trying to move on from…that.”
“So have I. But Donna’s father can’t.” I had looked him in the eye and seen what loss had done to him, how grief had scooped out the parts of him that were capable of joy and left behind a void. I swiped a strawberry off Lawrence’s plate. “I’m going there now. You want to join me?”
I watched Lawrence glance around the diner, the wary cast to his features quickly fading to a grin. “This is probably going to backfire, but if I can keep you from getting run off at gunpoint… Hell, I’m in. Anything for family, right?”
“Careful with those blank checks,” I shot back, secretly pleased. I knew my way around Topeka better than Kansas City, but to the people who’d once known my parents I was a stranger at best and a throwback to dark times at worst.
Lawrence slid his arm through mine as we made our way out of the diner. “I can’t wait to tell you about work. There’s this guy…” He trailed off abruptly, footsteps arresting so precipitously I nearly fell backward.
I caught just one glimpse at his face and knew he wasn’t messing around. Lawrence had paled, lips parted.
Up ahead, a car door slammed hard. “Get in the car,” growled the driver. “Now, Lawrence!”
“Dad—”
“Dad?” I repeated, choking on the word. Harry Pruitt the Elder had put on weight in the twenty years since I’d last seen him. I remembered him burly and tall, a rugged colossus, frightening to my nine-year-old self.
The man that stood before me today was rotund and balding, with a five o’clock shadow at nine in the morning.
He did not seem happy to see me.
“Hello, Mr. Pruitt,” I said, digging my heels into the concrete sidewalk. “I’m—”
“I know who you are,” Lawrence’s father barked. He marched toward me with a determined step.
On instinct, I recoiled.
“You ain’t welcome here.”
“I wasn’t aware you owned Topeka, Mr. Pruitt—” My recalcitrant streak was never more present than when it was least convenient. “Look,” I said, wincing, “Lawrence and I were just talking…” Why I felt compelled to explain myself to a virtual stranger, I didn’t know. I attempted it anyway.
Pruitt thrust a meaty finger into my face. “Stay away from him or I swear to God, you’ll be sorry.”
“Dad!” Lawrence cried out, aghast.
“Are you threatening me?”
It was broad daylight and I was reasonably sure that screaming for help would at least draw out the waitress at the diner, if not stop a few cars. That was the only reason I didn’t cower from Pruitt’s looming form. My heart had relocated into my shoes.
“Dad, come on…”
Lawrence’s pleas saw his father shift his bloodshot glare from me to Lawrence. I looked on as Pruitt grabbed him by the elbow. “What did I tell you about talking to her, huh? What did I say?”
Flushed, Lawrence did not reply.
He stumbled under his father’s hold. Our ga
zes only met once. He mouthed I’m sorry. I shook my head. It wasn’t his fault. His father had the look of a man used to employing violence to get his way. Another abusive asshole…
My heart went out to Lawrence, yet as the pick-up pulled away from the curb, I did nothing to stop him being taken away. I steadied myself with a hand against the side of the diner and doubled over. I was suddenly shaking so hard I thought I’d throw up, panic rippling through me like electric shocks.
Paris was full of men who catcalled or lobbed dirty slurs at the women who didn’t act sufficiently flattered, but I‘d never felt physically afraid of them. Not like I did now.
I braced my head on bent arms and focused on sucking deep, calming breaths into my lungs. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to pack up and meet Ashley in New York. We could fly back to Paris together, put this whole mess behind us.
I groped for my phone, dropping my handbag into the dirt in the process. No missed calls, but a text message from Ashley confirmed his flight details. All I had to do was buy a ticket to New York and be there when he landed. Easy enough, considering I’d made the selection earlier in the car. Trimming down the number of purchases in my basket to the one I wanted took less than ten seconds. I paused with my finger hovering over the ‘Proceed to checkout’ button.
There I was—in Topeka, just a few miles from the finish line, and rather than push through the panic attack that rode me like a demon, I was dreaming of a cowardly escape.
I pressed a hand to my stomach as if to smother the impulse. My pulse ricocheted through my ribcage and into my fingertips like a gong. Trivia to the rescue. What are four kinds of prehistoric creature that have survived to this day? Small but resilient organisms were everywhere around me. My PTSD was nothing compared to asteroids and extinctions and pest control.
I slid my phone back into my bag and straightened. I could do nothing for Lawrence, but I might able to give Donna’s father the closure he yearned for.
* * * *
The house was smaller than I remembered. Built on a slope, it lay nestled in a groove in the dirt. Back in the day, the garage doors would often jam because of snow and ice in the wintertime. The maple tree in the front yard had been cut down, now nothing but a crooked trunk rising from dirt once pocked with rusted leaves. The wooden gate gaped open, so I walked through it along the paved path to the front door, trepidation thrumming in my bones.
I rang the bell twice, then knocked when no sound came from behind the door. My stomach sank. Had I come all this way for nothing? I tipped back, searching the windows for sign of movement inside the house.
The door swung open.
“Can I help you?” a woman asked, looking me up and down. “Whatever you’re selling, we ain’t—”
“I’m not,” I answered quickly. “I’m, uh. I used to live here. My name is Laure Reynaud…” I hadn’t given much thought to how I would approach the new occupants if they were home. “I used to live here when I was a kid.”
The woman pursed her lips, her suspicion giving way to confusion. “I thought the house belonged to an elderly couple… You the daughter?”
“Not quite. Could I come in?”
My query prompted a sigh. “The baby’s sleeping.”
“I’ll be very quiet,” I wheedled. “Please, I drove all the way from Kansas City…”
Perhaps because I was a woman, alone, and shaped like a toothpick, I was met with the squeak of the door opening in reluctant invitation.
The woman introduced herself as Eileen Macintosh. She and her husband had bought the house a year back. They were new to the area, married only six months. She introduced me to Daisy, their eighteen-month-old daughter, with orders not to wake her up.
We made our way into the kitchen, the only part of the house that wasn’t covered entirely in clutter. Beneath the wall-mounted clock, thin gilded hands reaching out from Jesus’ heart to mark the hour, hung a picture of the happy couple on their wedding day. Mr. Eileen Macintosh looked every bit as all-American and wholesome as his wife.
“Still unpacking,” Eileen said breezily. “That’s what happens when you have little ones. No time for anything anymore… You got kids?”
I shook my head, trying not to be too noticeable as I looked around. At least two owners later and the ugly avocado kitchen units were still in place. The chintz lamp my father had put up still drooped from its wires over our heads. I half expected to hear my mother’s voice echo from the depths of the house, instructing me to wash my hands before dinner.
A pang of longing stabbed through me. Listening to Laura Nyro nearly nonstop in the car and seeing Lawrence that morning had brought the thought of her back with a vengeance. I felt her beside me like a furnace, at once comforting and punishing. Coming here hardly banished her ghost.
“So what can I do you for?” Eileen asked as she set a cup of coffee in front of me—my third of the day.
“It’s a bit of a long story. I think there might be something in your garden that my, um, father, left here before we moved.”
Eileen cocked her head. “Like buried treasure?” Her gaze had turned calculating. I could see her preparing to tell me that whatever was on the property belonged to her and her husband now. I didn’t blame her. Nothing about the cardboard boxes stacked in the living room and plastic hampers strewn around the house suggested that they were living a life of plenty.
“Not as such, no…” I didn’t really know how to say it.
“Then what?” Eileen pressed me, curling a strand of dyed-blonde hair around her thumb.
“My father is Tracey Kane,” I blurted out.
The response was immediate. Eileen’s features melted into a moue of bafflement. The rest of the country might have forgotten Kane, but Topeka remembered its very own serial killer. Kane had been pretty prolific.
Eileen looked like she had maybe five or six years on me. She must have been a teenager when the story broke. I had no doubt that her parents had warned her against walking around by herself, or speaking to strange men—the whole state had turned my father into its go-to cautionary tale.
They were less sure of what to do with me. I took advantage of Eileen’s slack-jawed stupefaction to get the rest of my story out. “I know this sounds weird and horrifying, but when I was little, I think I saw my father bury something in your back yard that could be relevant to, um, finding some of his victims. If I could just look around—”
“What did you see him bury?” Eileen pressed.
“I’m not sure… I think—I mean, there’s a chance it might have been a, uh…a body.”
Eileen snapped her mouth shut and drew back her shoulders. “You’ve got some nerve,” she huffed. “What is this? Some kind of prank? You think this is funny?” Her tone rose in pitch as she staggered upright, chair legs screeching against the linoleum. “Get out of my house!”
“Wait, I’m not—”
“I said get out!” She gripped me by the arm and yanked me from my seat like a rag doll. I thought of Lawrence. Her nails were needles in my flesh, stabbing through the thin fabric of my button-down.
I stumbled along like a marionette. Blood rushed to my face in a mixture of embarrassment and disbelief. “I’m not lying to you, I swear. My name is—”
“I don’t care who you are. How dare you come into my house and accuse me of living on a graveyard! Have you no shame?” Eileen jerked the front door open. Daisy began to wail in her crib, lending mindless support to her mother’s efforts to berate me.
My sneaker caught on a loose floorboard and I went flying to my knees, howling as I landed on the stone porch. Humiliation stained my cheeks pink, visceral and pitiless. Tears sprang to my eyes, but I blinked them away.
It was precisely what I deserved for having thought I could do this on my own.
There was no saving the day, no making things right for Joshua Barnes. I could barely save myself, let alone champion someone else’s cause.
“Everything okay, Eileen?” some busybody call
ed out from the road.
Maybe she opened her mouth to answer, maybe she didn’t, but the thought of letting that harpy get another word in edgewise was more than I could stomach.
I raised my head and shouted back, “Fuck off!” It felt good—freeing, like I wasn’t some weakling to be tossed around—for about five seconds. Then the fog cleared long enough for me to glimpse the police cruiser idling by the curb, a pair of black-clad policemen stepping out to answer my summons, one hand each on the pistols holstered at their hips.
I knew better than to crawl to my feet, I’d seen how well that worked out in movies, but I did it anyway. Indignation burned in my gut like a gas flame. I’d just been assaulted. I deserved a little compassion, God damn it.
What I got was two troopers pointing their guns at me like I was the bad guy. “Have you lost your minds?”
“Hands above your head!” they shouted back.
It might have been my imagination, but I could swear I saw their fingers tremble on the triggers.
In the throes of my fury, with blood trickling syrupy-hot down my shins, I realized I wasn’t going to make that flight to New York after all.
Chapter Eleven
“I swear, this is as weird for me as it is for you,” I breathed into the phone. “But if you could just pick up, I’m almost out of battery…”
The double doors of the precinct clanged shut behind me, drowning out the hum of voices and ringing telephones. Fresh air replaced the cloying scent of plastic and steel. I could still feel the handcuffs around my wrists, though they’d been removed as soon as I’d been processed. Eileen wasn’t pressing charges, so I was free to go.
I had to blink a few times before my eyes adjusted to the light. Then once more for good measure to make sure I wasn’t daydreaming.
Ashley waved a hand as his cab idled by the curb.
“Your phone is on silent,” I admonished, lowering mine and hitting ‘End call’.
