by Lisa Regan
Jade looked at the bottle as though she were holding a severed head. “So a woman who never drinks takes this bottle away from another parent who actually was drinking and threatens to call 911 if he doesn’t sober up, takes the bottle into a gas station bathroom, leaving five kids parked outside alone for an hour, and drinks the whole damn thing. A woman, by the way, with no stressors in her life. A woman who was just fine. Are you listening to this shit, Parks? ’Cause it doesn’t make one bit of sense.”
Connor stepped into the first stall and looked around. Toilet paper hung in shreds from an empty roll affixed to the stall’s wall. The chrome waste box marked “For feminine waste only” overflowed with bunched-up toilet paper. At his feet, discarded toilet paper formed a wet clump near the front of the toilet. “I’m listening,” he told Jade. “Obviously, we’re missing a huge piece of the puzzle, Webb.”
“You think there was someone in here with her?”
“Nah,” Connor said. “What, someone spent an hour in here with her, with her little girl coming in and out?”
The second stall was considerably messier. Wet toilet paper clumped in small mountains on the floor, making a squishing sound as he stepped in it. It looked like someone had had a toilet-paper fight in the place. It hung from the back of the commode and gathered in piles all over the floor.
Connor said, “The phone.”
“Yeah,” Jade said. “We need to know who called her and why. It all comes down to the phone.”
“It’s here.”
“What?”
He felt Jade at his back. He pointed to the toilet, where a cell phone rested beneath the water in the cradle usually reserved for human waste.
“Fuck me,” Jade muttered.
“Doesn’t look like anyone used this stall since Holloway was here.”
“Who would want to? And who would want to reach in there and pull it out?”
Connor fished his own pair of latex gloves from his pocket and put them on. “We would,” he said. “Only we would.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Brianna plopped down on the couch next to Claire with a deep sigh. She fussed with her wet curls, her expression pinched. “I took two showers, and I still smell like river.”
Claire laughed. “River?”
“You know, like wet, disgusting mud and fish and stuff.”
“You don’t smell like river. You didn’t even get that wet.”
Brianna snatched the remote control from the coffee table and hit the power button. “Let’s see how wet I was. One of the guys from my bar exam study group texted me and said he saw me on channel three. It was a breaking news alert.”
As the big flat-screen television mounted on the wall across from them flicked on, they both put their feet up on their coffee table. It was a large square, uneven thing made from reclaimed wood. Brianna hated it because it looked too unfinished—“Like someone chopped up a tree and threw a slab of it on legs”—but Claire relished its rustic look. She’d paid a local artist way too much for it, but she had loved the idea of reclaimed wood. That was during the peak of her intense Reclaiming My Life period. She would never get rid of the table. Brianna knew that, which was why she tolerated it.
Wilson circled the room and, with a sigh, crawled beneath their legs and went to sleep. Claire dangled one bare foot between the couch and table and used it to massage Wilson’s side. She loved the feel of his soft fur. On the television, an old sitcom played.
“I guess it’s still a few minutes before the news comes on,” Brianna said. She turned her body so that she was facing Claire. “So, how are you feeling? Really. Don’t say ‘Fine,’ because I won’t believe you.”
Claire reached up behind them and pulled down the afghan they kept folded on the top of the couch. She hadn’t been able to get warm since they got home. She could still feel the cold river water enveloping her body. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know how I feel. I’m …” She drifted off. An image of wide brown eyes in a pale face framed by blonde hair came unbidden. Not Leah Holloway. It was Miranda Simon. Fourteen years ago, Claire’s abductor had killed the girl right in front of her. It was one of the moments she’d worked hardest to bar from her mind. But now, here it was—the terror in Miranda Simon’s eyes as clear to her as it had been when she watched the girl die.
“What?” Brianna asked. “What is it?”
Claire could barely get the word out. “Sarah.”
“Who?”
“Miranda Simon.” The girl would always be Sarah to Claire. Claire had had to give her a name. Reynard Johnson had killed her before Claire could find out anything about her. “They looked the same,” Claire tried to explain. She motioned toward the television even though the news was not yet on. “Leah Holloway and Miranda Simon. Blonde hair, brown eyes. That look.”
The girl had known it was the end the instant Johnson looped the belt around her neck. There was nothing quite like that kind of stark, putrid fear. Claire had been consumed by it many times when she thought Johnson was going to kill her. Miranda Simon had had no choice. Johnson had overpowered her, kidnapped her, and bound her. She was never in any position to fight back, and Claire, handcuffed to a radiator, hadn’t been in a position to save the girl.
But Holloway.
“Why didn’t she unlock the doors?” Claire asked.
Brianna frowned. “Wait, are we still talking about Miranda Simon?”
“I’m sorry, no. Leah Holloway. She had a choice. All she had to do was press one button. I could have helped her. I could have saved her.”
Claire had spent a great deal of her post-escape therapy trying to assuage her own guilt over Miranda Simon’s murder, trying to come to terms with her own powerlessness in the face of her abductor’s rage. She thought she had gotten there, but now, she wasn’t so sure. Now she felt the same sense of powerlessness. Today, it wasn’t a room that had separated her from Leah Holloway. It wasn’t a psychopath who had kept Claire from saving the woman. It was a pane of glass, and the woman herself.
Brianna put a hand on Claire’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “It’s not your fault, Claire. You’re right, that woman did have a choice, and she made it when she drove off the overpass. She made her choice before she even made it to the river. Stop beating yourself up. I mean, you got all the kids out!”
Claire tried to tuck the images of both women—Simon and Holloway—away in her mind. She managed a smile for her sister. “No, you did. Thank you, by the way, for doing the press interview for me.”
“Yeah, well, you owe me one. That Noel Geary is a little vicious, if you ask me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, you’ll see,” Brianna said. “So, where did you and Connor go? How were things between you two? It seemed pretty intense on the riverbank.”
Claire told her. Then, because she knew her sister would never let up until she dragged every last detail out of her, she said, “We almost kissed. I mean, I think. I was upset. I—I told him to come by later.”
Brianna slapped Claire’s knee, drawing a neck-craning look from Wilson. “That’s great! So, do you think he’ll come by?”
“I don’t know. I mean, he’s working now and will probably be working pretty much around the clock until the investigation into this accident is over.”
“But you want him to come by? You want to see him?”
Claire felt her cheeks pink up. “Yeah. I don’t know. I think I want to. I felt so—so jealous when I saw him with that female detective.”
Brianna wrinkled her nose. “Yeah. She seemed overly familiar with him, but he only had eyes for you, so I wouldn’t worry too much about her.”
“It’s just that seeing them together made me think of him with other women, you know, in a way I hadn’t really thought about it before. I didn’t like it. I would love to try again—I just don’t know if it’s a good idea. I mean, that accident today, it really … messed with my head. It brought some stuff back up for me. I don’t want to get
involved with Connor again as a way of distracting myself from those horrible memories. Nothing has changed from two years ago.” She thought of how good and safe it had felt in his arms. That hadn’t changed either. She thought of their almost kiss in Dr. Corey’s office and the attraction she felt for him, in spite of all of her baggage. That hadn’t changed either. And yet, she didn’t know if that attraction could carry them into a real relationship. Her fingers worried at the edge of the afghan. “I still may or may not be able to have sex with Connor. It is always going to be an issue between us. I mean how can we have a romantic relationship with no sex?”
Brianna said, “Let me ask you something. Do you enjoy sex at all? Do you feel, you know, attraction toward men in that way?”
It was a subject she’d discussed at length with her therapist over the years. Claire had been fifteen when she was abducted. She’d already developed an attraction to men. She knew what sex was—many of her friends had already been having it. She had, a few times, experienced the breathless excitement of kissing a boy she liked. But then she had been abducted. She’d been raped so many times, she had lost count. Sex began to equal violence.
Sure, since then she had had sex with men who were gentle and caring, but she had never been sure if she’d had sex with them because she was genuinely attracted to them or because she was just determined to be normal. But Connor … she had always been attracted to him. He had always made her heart flutter in the way it had when she was fifteen—pre-abduction.
“I’m attracted to Connor,” she told her sister.
“Do you like, you know, being with him?”
Claire looked away from her sister, cheeks growing hotter. “I do. I mean, there will just always be certain things I can’t do, certain ways I cannot be touched.”
Brianna frowned, her expression a mixture of sympathy and anger at the reminder of what Claire had been forced to endure. What had been taken from her. “Well,” Brianna said. “Sex is supposed to be pleasurable. It should feel good. That’s the whole point—well, I mean other than the whole reproduction thing. Look, if you’re not getting any pleasure from it, even with Connor—and I know you two haven’t done it yet, but I’m talking even the foreplay, because all of that is sexual—then maybe you’re right, and there is no point in going forward. But if being with Connor in a sexual way is pleasurable at all, then I think you owe it to yourself to try.”
Pleasure. Of course, who would know better than Claire that sex was about pleasure? Hadn’t her abductor raped her for four long years because it felt good to him? Hadn’t she had ten years of her life stolen from her because of that very correlation—sex equals pleasure? Her abductor had gotten years of pleasure from her body.
And it pissed her off that now that same body betrayed her. It pissed her off that she should have so much difficulty deriving pleasure from the same act. Why should he have taken all the pleasure out of sex so that now she could have none? It wasn’t fair.
But he didn’t take it all. “Things do feel good with Connor,” she blurted.
Brianna smiled. “Well, there’s your answer. Hey, the news is on.”
Beneath their feet, Wilson stirred, wriggling out of reach of Claire’s foot and standing. He circled the room as Brianna turned the volume up on the television, and sprawled out again on a wider piece of carpet. The news led with the Holloway story. It was the first time in nearly a month that the lead story didn’t involve the Soccer Mom Strangler.
Looking as buxom and blonde as ever, Noel Geary stood on the side of the road, the American River and the Jibboom Street Bridge visible behind her. A police crew towed a red SUV out of the water.
“Today, at approximately eleven thirty a.m., a young mother with five children in her vehicle drove her SUV off the I-5 overpass, causing a series of accidents that claimed four lives before crashing through the guardrail and plummeting into the American River. At this hour, it is unclear why the driver would try to take the lives of five precious children.”
The screen cut to a man in his forties wearing a Clippers hat and a plain white T-shirt. He stood on the side of the highway, the corners of his eyes pinched. “I saw her coming from the other direction. She was weaving, going way too fast. She was all over the road. I pulled over to call 911, and that’s when she hit those other two cars—BAM!”
The screen cut to an image of two badly mangled vehicles, one covered partially with a tarp. The other one had thick black smoke billowing from what was left of its compacted hood. They cut away to a woman this time, standing to the side of the wreckage, her long brown hair blowing in the wind. “Then she went right through the concrete,” the woman explained. “It was awful. Just awful.”
The broadcast cut back to Noel Geary. “The Dodge Durango plunged into the river where two women were fishing. One of those women, Brianna Fletcher, immediately dove into the water and made it to the car in time to pull the children out.”
Claire watched as the camera panned out, revealing Brianna’s willowy frame. She looked damp and bedraggled, staring uncertainly at the lens.
“Miss Fletcher, what was going through your mind when you saw the vehicle crash into the water?”
On-screen, Brianna shrugged. “I didn’t think,” she said into Noel’s microphone. “I just went for it. I mean, there wasn’t time to think. I just dove into the water.”
“What happened when you got to the vehicle?”
Beside Noel, Brianna shifted uncomfortably, wrapping her arms around her middle. “I, uh, I saw that there were people—there were kids in the car and I just—I tried to get them out.”
“And you did. You got all the kids out safely. What about the driver? Was she still alive when you got to the car?”
“Oh yeah, she was. She—she was still alive,” Brianna stammered. “But, uh, badly hurt. I—I went for the kids first.”
“Once the children were rescued, did you go back to car for the mother?”
“Uh, no, I—I didn’t,” Brianna said. On the television, Brianna shifted from foot to foot, her arms tightening around her middle. She looked away from the camera, opening her mouth to speak but then clamping it shut again.
“You didn’t try to rescue the mother?” Noel asked pointedly.
Still, Brianna did not meet the dead eye of the camera. “No, I mean, she was hurt, badly hurt. I didn’t think—”
“Did any of the other people who stopped to help get the children out of the river go back to the vehicle for the mother?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
“Miss Fletcher,” Noel went on. “Did the mother speak to you when you swam out there and began rescuing the children? Did she give you any indication as to why she drove into the river?”
Brianna mumbled, “No, no. She didn’t say anything.”
On-screen, Jade Webb stepped into the frame, using her body to block Brianna almost entirely from view. She said, “We have no additional details to give at this time.”
“Detective,” Noel said. “Was the mother deceased by the time police arrived?”
Jade ignored her. “This is an ongoing investigation. We will not be releasing any more information at this time.”
“Detective,” Noel went on as if Jade hadn’t spoken. “The driver was left in the vehicle by rescuers. We now know she is deceased. Can you confirm that she drowned while the children were being moved to shore?”
Jade shot Noel a scathing look, but Noel was completely unperturbed. She kept firing off questions as Jade lifted a hand to block the camera. Like a broken record, Jade repeated, “This is an active investigation.”
The camera cut back to the anchorman in the television studio, who moved on to other news. Claire let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding and turned to her sister. Brianna’s grimace was fixed in place. Claire said, “She basically just accused you—or me, I guess—of leaving Leah Holloway in that car to die.”
“I know. It was not good. But what could I say? I didn’t want
to blurt out that she killed herself. What if her family sees that interview?”
Claire didn’t say it, but she imagined it would be worse for Holloway’s family to think that Brianna could have rescued the woman and didn’t. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have done the interview. You shouldn’t even be in this position.”
“Maybe Holloway shouldn’t have tried killing everyone she saw today,” Brianna replied. “Look, I don’t care what anyone says. Those kids are safe. You and I know what really happened. That’s all that matters. This will blow over eventually.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Holloway house was a two-story brown-and-white contemporary set back behind a generous, well-kept front yard, ringed by carefully tended flowerbeds. The black-eyed Susans still stood tall, leaning slightly in the direction of the sun, which had started to drop below the horizon. The driveway showed wear, though, the blacktop chipping where it met the sidewalk. Against the garage door leaned a child’s bike complete with training wheels, arrayed in pink and yellow flowers, a Hello Kitty bag affixed to its handlebars. Discarded between the driveway and the front door was a child’s tricycle, fire-engine red. Connor stepped over a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure as he and Jade made their way to the front door. The door itself was white. A wreath made of bright yellow and orange artificial flowers hung from it. A black GMC Sierra sat in the driveway.
Jade rang the doorbell. A moment later, Jim Holloway answered, looking like someone had dragged him ten blocks from the back of a car. He scratched at some dried spit-up on his shirt and stared at them dumbly. “It’s you,” he said.
Connor managed a tight smile. Behind him he could hear Jade’s groan, barely audible but definitely there.
“They’re asleep,” Jim said.
Connor glanced behind the man into the living room. A periwinkle-blue sectional dominated the room. Along one wall was a white three-tiered particleboard toy organizer, its plastic bins overflowing with toys. Fleece blankets bearing various Disney characters lay atop the sectional. In another corner of the room stood a brown tweed recliner, its frame slightly lopsided. A small table stood beside it, the television remote at its center. The television was easily fifty inches, sitting atop a small entertainment center that held a DVD player and about a hundred children’s movies on DVD. Framed photos of the Holloways adorned the cream-colored walls. Quickly, Connor counted the framed photos. From where he stood, he could see at least a dozen. Most were candid shots of the family on vacation: camping, at the beach, what looked like the Sacramento Zoo, Disneyland. A few had been professionally shot, the family dressed in their Sunday best and forced into artificial poses.
