Losing Leah Holloway (A Claire Fletcher and Detective Parks Mystery Book 2)

by Lisa Regan

  “Can you look it over for us and tell us everyone Leah might have had regular contact with? We’ll need to talk to everyone. We’ll also need to take a look at her computer.”

  Ashley smiled wanly. “I’ll talk to Leah’s supervisor.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Sammy’s was a small bagel shop not far from Claire and Brianna’s house. It was nestled in the middle of a strip of stores amid otherwise tree-lined residential streets. Parking was impossible, as the two spots out front that were allocated to Sammy’s were usually taken by people picking up their clothes at the dry cleaner next door. The inside was decorated in black and chrome with three rows of metal tables and chairs, each set made to seat only two people. A long counter at the back sat next to a large glass case displaying the various types of bagels they offered. Behind that hung a large chalkboard that the staff updated daily depending on what was available. Claire and Brianna had become regulars shortly after moving into their house. The owner, Sammy, had become a good friend. The first time Claire met him, he had wept at the sight of her. “It’s so good to see you alive,” he had told her.

  It wasn’t until she saw the many yellowed missing-persons fliers taped in his window, behind his register, in the bathroom, and on the community corkboard that she understood. He had been captivated by her case since she’d disappeared, had helped with various community searches, attended vigils, kept her face in front of his customers for ten long years. He was a stranger to her, and yet he had held out hope for her safe return for a decade. Held it out for others to see in the hopes that one day someone would see something and say something. Most of the time, the attention that her ordeal brought her made her uncomfortable. She felt like a spectacle, a circus act, a curiosity. But Sammy made her feel like an old friend returning from a long, arduous journey. For a long time, Sammy’s was the only place she could go.

  The staff there had gotten to know both Claire and Brianna over the years, so when they walked in on Monday morning for their usual bagels and coffee to start the week, a small cheer erupted from behind the counter. Three staff members were on—two women and a man, all college aged. All the workers wore baseball caps declaring “Sammy’s” and beneath that: “Sacramento’s Best Bagels.” Claire knew them all. One of the young women, Nancy Thompson, hurried around the counter, smiling broadly beneath her cap, and hugged Brianna tightly to her. Claire smiled to herself, watching Brianna stiffen in the embrace. Although Brianna was very affectionate with Claire and the rest of their immediate family, she hated casual affection. You had to earn Brianna’s desire for affection with time, loyalty, and proximity. Nancy’s unexpected hug caught her off guard, particularly when she realized the dozen or so customers in the shop were now staring at her, wide-eyed.

  “You’re a hero!” Nancy said, releasing Brianna from the hug but holding on to her shoulders and looking her up and down, an expression of wonder on her pale pixie face. “Your breakfast is on the house,” she told them. “Sammy’s orders. For every kid you pulled out of that car, you eat here free for a week.”

  “Wow,” Claire said. “That’s great. Does she get a plus one with that?”

  Brianna turned to Claire and rolled her eyes. “Like you’ve ever paid for a bagel in this place.”

  Claire moved past her to get in line. “Once, when Buddy first started, I did.”

  From behind the counter, Buddy hollered, “It was my first day! I didn’t know!”

  Claire winked and smiled at him. She always made sure to leave a decent amount of money in the tip jar in spite of Sammy’s insistence that she eat for free.

  A young man in a River Cats hat came up behind them. He gestured to the counter. “Do you mind if I go?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” Claire told him.

  He smiled his thanks and moved to the counter to place his order.

  “So what was it like?” Nancy asked Brianna.

  One of the rapt customers pointed and said, “Are you the chick who saved those kids from the river on Saturday?”

  A woman who had just gotten in line touched Brianna’s shoulder and said, “God bless you. It’s terrible what happened to those kids. The poor families.”

  A half-dozen conversations about the Holloway crash erupted all over the room like tiny geysers of morbid curiosity. Claire heard snippets rising from the cacophony.

  “Can you believe she was drunk at ten in the morning?”

  “I heard they weren’t even her kids.”

  “Killed four people on the overpass.”

  “What kind of person would do something like that?”

  Claire glanced around, beginning to feel some of Brianna’s discomfort. It was crowded, as it was most weekday mornings. Their preferred table near the front window was taken, but that wouldn’t have afforded much privacy anyway. Sammy’s only had one semiprivate table—the one that sat at the mouth of the small hallway leading to the restrooms. But the man in the River Cats hat had taken it, a bagel and steaming cup of coffee in front of him, as yet untouched. He was engrossed in something on his phone. Claire was thinking about how she might go about asking him for the table when Brianna dug an elbow into her side.

  Buddy had slid a tray across the counter with their usual on it. Brianna moved past Claire and scooped it up. “Let’s go,” she said.

  “You sure you want to eat here?” Claire said.

  Brianna rolled her eyes. “We eat here all the time. I’m not leaving. Just grab a table.”

  They found one along the wall. Claire was acutely aware of the patrons staring in their direction. Brianna kept her eyes on Claire and picked up the conversation they’d been having before they left the house. “I just can’t believe that detective is dead. They said on the news it was under ‘suspicious circumstances.’ Is that cop talk for murdered?”

  Claire shrugged. She couldn’t bring herself to meet Brianna’s eyes. Talking about Jade Webb made her uncomfortable, and not just because Connor had told her things about the case that she could not repeat, even to her sister. “I don’t know. I know they’re investigating.”

  “I can’t believe we just saw her. How is Connor?”

  “He’s completely broken,” Claire said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so down.”

  “And you?”

  Finally, Claire looked at her sister. “You can tell?”

  Brianna smiled. “You know what you look like when you feel guilty? Remember when we were little and you cut off your hair and stuffed it into your footie pajamas and then the zipper got stuck?”

  Claire laughed. “God, what was I? Five?”

  “Four,” Brianna corrected. “Dad had to use pliers to get the zipper open. You had stuffed so much hair in there, it got caught in the zipper and broke the damn thing. You were so squirmy and uncomfortable. That’s how you look whenever I mention this woman. As your big sister, let me start off by saying that what happened to her is not your fault.”

  Claire put her bagel down, placed her hands in her lap, and stared at them. “I disliked her on sight.”

  “So? You don’t have to like everyone you meet.”

  “I didn’t like her because she seemed so familiar with Connor. I was worried that they had been—that they had had a relationship, you know, a romantic relationship. I never even gave her a chance.”

  “It’s called jealousy. We all feel it from time to time. Even if you had loved the woman from the instant you saw her, it would change nothing. She would still have died.”

  Claire knew that Brianna was trying to make her feel better. She couldn’t say the one thing that she kept coming back to because it was just too shameful: she had wanted Jade gone. Not dead or harmed in any way. More like transferred to another department or another city. Just gone in a way that she wouldn’t get to see Connor every day, laugh at his jokes, playfully touch his arm, wink at him, and generally flirt with him. This was unfamiliar territory for her. Guilt was a heavy stone in her stomach, lightened only by the memory of the
night she had spent with Connor, even though he was inextricably bound up in her conflicted feelings about Jade’s death.

  “Well,” Brianna said. “I don’t think you should spend too much time on it. Connor needs you right now. I mean, his colleague dies, and he comes directly to you.”

  “Excuse me.” An elderly woman with short gray hair and a thick middle approached the table. She smiled kindly at Brianna. “I don’t mean to bother you. I just wanted to say God bless you for what you did, saving all those kids.”

  Brianna swallowed the food she’d been chewing and returned the woman’s smile. Only Claire could see the waver of her lips, her awkwardness, the struggle to remember that she had a good reason to lie to people, which was to protect her sister.

  “Thank you,” Brianna said. “I appreciate that.”

  The woman patted Brianna’s shoulder and walked off. Claire and Brianna hunched closer together. “I gotta say, I’m relieved no one here is crucifying me after that horrible newscast.”

  “Me too,” Claire said. “Seems like people are just happy you saved all the kids. Plus, the news that Holloway was drunk probably deflects a lot of attention away from why you didn’t try to get her out of the car.”

  “Maybe,” Brianna said. “So, what I was trying to say before was that Connor needs you right now. I think it’s a good sign that he came to you.”

  “Excuse me,” a man said, appearing next to their table. He looked to be in his forties, with deeply tanned skin and a tattoo sleeve on his right arm. “You’re on TV,” he said. He pointed over his shoulder where the large flat-screen TV Sammy had mounted on the wall showed clips from the original newscast in which Brianna had given her interview. Sure enough, there she was, soaked and bedraggled, talking in stilted sentences about a rescue she didn’t make.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” Brianna said to the man, smiling tightly.

  “Well,” he said. “That’s pretty badass, what you did.”

  “Thank you,” Brianna said, the tight smile frozen on her face.

  That man chatted with them for a few minutes and went on his way only to be followed immediately by the young guy in the River Cats hat from earlier. “Ladies,” he said. He held his hat in his hands and smiled, showing off beautifully straight white teeth. Thick golden-brown hair fell into his blue eyes. Claire knew Brianna had been about to say something borderline rude, this being the third interruption in less than ten minutes, but after she got a good look at him, she clamped her mouth shut. The man pointed toward the table he had just vacated.

  “You can have my table if you want,” he said. “I’m leaving. It’s more private back there.”

  Brianna smiled. “Thank you so much.” She stood and shook his hand. “My name is Brianna.”

  He winked at her. “I know. I saw you on TV. It was pretty brave, what you did, by the way.”

  “Thanks,” Brianna acknowledged.

  “Guess you’re famous now.”

  “Only in here,” Brianna replied.

  “Well, in that case, take my hat too. Between that and the table, you should be able to eat the rest of your meal without anyone bothering you.”

  Without another word, he fitted the cap onto Brianna’s head, and she let him. His smile was captivating. Brianna touched the brim of the cap lightly. “I can’t take your hat.”

  “Please. I have ten of them at home. It’s my pleasure. For the hometown hero and all that.”

  Brianna returned his smile. “That’s so sweet.”

  Claire felt like she was intruding on the moment. She cleared her throat, but neither one of them acknowledged her.

  “What was it like?” he asked. “In the river?”

  “Wet,” Brianna said.

  The man laughed softly. “I guess it was,” he agreed. “So, that lady, the driver, you couldn’t get her out of the car?”

  The flirty moment came screeching to a halt. Brianna’s body went still. She had that awkward, deer-in-the-headlights expression she’d worn when Noel Geary had asked her the same question. She adjusted the cap on her head. “Uh, no. I had to get the kids out first. By the time they were all out of the car, she was … she was gone.”

  “Why didn’t you just get her out first?”

  Brianna’s smile began to fail. “I couldn’t. She was—there was something wrong with her door. It was … chaotic. I was just trying to get the kids out.”

  “You said on the news that she was hurt. If she was hurt, wouldn’t you want to get her out first, so you could get her help?”

  “I couldn’t get her out,” Brianna said. “The door was lo—jammed. She was—I’m sorry. I’m really not comfortable talking about this anymore.”

  The moment stretched out. He stared at Brianna’s face. Claire was suddenly hyperaware of the ambient noise—the hushed conversations of other patrons, the staff behind the counter shouting out orders, the gurgle of the coffeemakers, the thwap of the bagels falling from the toaster onto the cooling tray. The man glanced at Claire briefly, then toward the front door. When he turned back, a smile was pasted on his face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m being a douche, aren’t I? Too many questions. I’ll go. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  He didn’t wait for a response, instead turning and walking briskly toward the front door. Brianna watched him leave. Even Claire couldn’t help watching him walk away. He looked as though he should be modeling men’s underwear.

  They moved quickly to his table. Brianna left the hat on. “Strangeness aside, he was pretty hot,” she said.

  Claire laughed. “I think he’s a little too young for you.”

  “Oh please. I don’t want to marry him, I just want to have a sleepover.” She lowered her voice, hunching forward over her bagel. “Speaking of sleepovers, can we please talk about last night?”

  Claire blushed instantly. Had Brianna heard her and Connor making love? She hadn’t thought they were loud. They hadn’t even woken Wilson. Claire took a gulp of coffee. “Last night?”

  “I know something happened. I don’t know what, but something happened. You’re different today. Besides, I saw the two of you saying goodbye. It was like no one else in the world existed, and you were leaving each other for all of eternity, which would be absolutely sickening if it weren’t you and Connor. I mean, a marching band could have shown up in the street at that moment, and you two would have been oblivious.”

  The memory pushed all lingering thoughts of Jade out of Claire’s head, at least for the moment. She suppressed a giddy smile. She felt like a teenager again—like the teenager she had been before a raging sicko of a pedophile took ten years of her life. Even though she was sad and distressed about Jade’s death and very worried for Connor, she also felt light-headed, slightly drunk with the thought of what had happened between them. She had resigned herself to the fact that sex was perhaps a part of her life that her captor had permanently taken from her. She had done it with other men, as a sort of fuck you to her abuser and to those ten years of hell, but had doubted she would ever derive any real pleasure from it. It would always be something she did with tensed muscles and gritted teeth, gripping bed sheets and wishing it over quickly, like getting a tetanus shot. But she had been wrong.

  She was never so happy to be wrong.

  “Oh my God, you did it,” Brianna said. “I can tell by your face. You did it.”

  Claire’s cheeks flamed. “Shh! Keep your voice down, would you? Your fans might hear!”

  Brianna shook her head. “Please. They should be your fans, and they won’t hear us back here. So, tell me!”

  Claire smiled. She picked up her bagel and put it back down. Where to start?

  “We did it,” Claire whispered.

  Brianna squealed with delight, clapping her hands together. “I knew it.”

  The words seemed so inadequate to describe what had happened. Sure, they’d had sex, but it had felt like so much more. It was still so hard to believe. She had always wanted this but never thought it would happen.
In the past, acting on any attraction she felt would inevitably cause her trauma to rise quickly to the surface. The flood of memories made her shut down. A trigger, her therapist called it. It would be a certain level of pressure in a man’s touch, a certain way of breathing, certain acts. Most of it was so subtle, even Claire had trouble pinpointing the triggers.

  Early on in their relationship, before they’d broken up, Connor had tried to avoid every trigger she had, but it was an impossible feat. Maybe she hadn’t been ready then. Maybe she still wasn’t. As elated as she was, she was already nervous for the next time. There would be a next time. That’s how romantic relationships worked. She remembered how he felt quivering beneath her, his skin hot and damp against hers, his smell, his beard scraping over her skin, and some of her nervousness gave way to excitement.

  “So?” Brianna asked. “How was it? Did you cry this time? I mean, you were okay with it?”

  “Better than okay. It was amazing. I think I—I know I had my first, you know …”

  “Orgasm?” Brianna blurted.

  Claire glanced out into the main dining area, but no one appeared to be listening. Her cheeks felt like she’d tried to iron them. “Uh, yeah.”

  Brianna grinned. “Well, that changes things, doesn’t it?”

  Claire could not contain her own smile. “Yeah,” she said. “I think it does.”

  She didn’t talk about Connor’s grief or the blissful forgetting they had found in one another. She’d finally had sex, real sex, with someone she loved. It was nothing at all like a tetanus shot.

  “I’m happy for you,” Brianna said. “You deserve amazing.”

  The scorching feeling crept down her neck. “It was better than amazing. I had no idea.”