“She doesn’t have any jet fuel,” Eric said. “She’ll be fine.”
Sadie couldn’t think of a good argument for that. She lifted a hand to her hair, frowning at the way her hairspray didn’t seem to have dried all the way, leaving her hair sticky and flat. On the way to the car she tried to fluff it back up, but it didn’t seem to do much good. She wondered how women who lived in such heat did their hair. Her spiky, curly coiffure was certainly not a good choice for this climate.
Sadie slid into the passenger seat and hoped she was doing the right thing by going with Eric instead of heading for the Miami airport. After putting a stack of papers on the dashboard, he buckled his seat belt, shifted into reverse, and backed out of the driveway. Sadie waited until they were on the road before she asked the question she’d wanted to know the answer to all day.
“So, what’s wrong with her?” she asked, trying to use her most diplomatic tone.
“Layla?” Eric answered, glancing at Sadie quickly.
Sadie gave him a look that said Who else would I be talking about?
Eric took a breath. “Layla,” he said, almost sighing as he spoke her name. “Layla, Layla, Layla.”
Fruity Pasta Salad
2 cups mayonnaise
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1⁄2 teaspoon celery seed
1⁄2 cup honey
1 teaspoon salt
1⁄2 teaspoon pepper
2 to 3 chicken breasts, diced*
1 (16-ounce) package tri-colored pasta (Rotini, wacky mac, penne, etc.)
2 (15-ounce) cans mandarin oranges, drained (Shawn likes fresh mangoes, for a more tropical taste)
1⁄4 pound sugar snap peas, sliced diagonally
1⁄2 cup chopped green onions
Chow mein noodles
In a medium-sized bowl, mix the mayonnaise, minced garlic, celery seed, honey, salt, and pepper together. Cover and place in the refrigerator. Cook the chicken in a pan, then dice and place in a large bowl. While the chicken is cooking, cook the pasta, then drain and add to chicken. Add the mandarin oranges, sugar snap peas, green onions, and mayonnaise sauce to the bowl. Gently mix together until everything is covered with the sauce. Refrigerate for one hour before serving. Top with chow mein noodles.
Serves 12.
*Can use canned chicken in a pinch.
Chapter 19
Sadie tried to read into the tone of Eric’s voice, wondering if there were any feelings for his ex-wife betrayed within it. She also realized she’d nearly forgotten about the little detail of Eric having stayed at Layla’s last night. But after seeing Eric and Layla together, she didn’t feel like her previous suspicions had any foundation. There was no chemistry left between them, and she’d bet a thousand dollars Eric had slept on the couch last night. Her wonderings came to a halt when Eric started talking.
“About eighteen years ago, Layla was in a car accident,” Eric said, leaning toward the driver’s side door and holding the steering wheel with his right hand. “She sustained a head injury that affected her frontal lobe and left her with a variety of problems including what they call blunted affect.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Sadie said. “Vietnam vets sometimes get it, don’t they?”
A boy from the neighborhood where she had grown up had left for the war a high school basketball star and came home a recluse who didn’t make eye contact or smile. He lived in a back room of his parents’ house and, up until Sadie had moved away and lost contact, never recovered from whatever happened to him in Southeast Asia.
“It’s similar to what some post-traumatic stress victims end up with, yes,” Eric said. “But no two cases are the same, or so I hear.”
“Eighteen years ago?” Sadie asked. “Were you married?”
Eric looked straight ahead as he rolled through a stop sign. “Yeah,” he said simply. Sadie wondered if he was glad to be driving as they talked about this so that he had something else to focus on. Even though he kept his tone level, she could hear the deeply buried hurt beneath the layers. “And I was warned from the start that most relationships crumble under the pressure of brain injuries. I had hoped to avoid becoming a statistic, but it was harder than I could have ever imagined.”
“She seems pretty functional,” Sadie said. “Just kind of out of it.” She hoped she wasn’t sounding critical, but ending your marriage after your spouse sustained an injury, even a serious one, was hard for Sadie to justify automatically.
Eric shook his head, and Sadie noticed his jaw was set, making her wonder if he was feeling defensive. “At first she couldn’t focus on anything, couldn’t complete tasks. She got very angry and frustrated all the time. She went to all kinds of doctors and therapists and improved little by little for about nine months. Then she stopped improving. A couple months later, her neurologist dropped the bombshell—she had plateaued on her rehab. Whether it was due to her inability to cope or simply her lack of motivation, everyone felt she’d made all the progress she would make. The therapy stopped, the hope we’d been given disappeared, and she started watching TV all day. She’s made some improvements since then—she can take care of herself and the house—but she still doesn’t . . . feel anything. She doesn’t think about how other people are feeling, doesn’t comprehend other people’s emotional responses to things. She doesn’t cry or laugh or show affection. She just . . . exists. Except when she gets angry. And then she gets very, very angry.”
“Wow,” Sadie said, her heart softening as she imagined what Eric had been through. “That would be hard. How old was Megan when the accident happened?”
Eric began unconsciously rubbing his left thumb against his thigh as though trying to clean something off of his hand. “Seven.” He took a breath. “Layla was a wonderful mother before then—parks, books, dress up; Megan loved to have her hair brushed, and every night Layla would sit with her on the bed and brush her hair out while they talked.” He paused, and Sadie sensed he was very far away for a moment. “I’d sometimes stand in the doorway and just watch them. We called Megan Sweetie Pie—I know, lots of parents call their daughters that—but Layla had made up a song about her nickname, about how she was as sweet as pie.” He paused again and took another deep breath. “We’d wanted more children, but were trying to get on our feet financially before we did. Layla had to work and didn’t want to have another baby only to leave it in daycare, so I was working hard to grow my business; that’s what brought us to Homestead.”
Sadie wondered if he had ever told their story quite this way. Their story: his, Layla’s, and Megan’s.
After a few seconds, he continued. “Then Layla had her accident—it wasn’t even that serious—but the head injury was enough to change her into someone else completely. She didn’t like to be touched and had no patience anymore for a little girl. She’d stay up ’til three o’clock in the morning watching TV as though she thought it would disappear tomorrow. She’d lie if it helped her get what she wanted, or kept her out of trouble; she charged up a credit card she stole from my wallet. She’d leave the house and walk for hours and hours until I either found her or the police did. Her mom moved down from Gainesville so she could help while I was at work. We hoped and prayed that she would wake up one day. Instead she simply accepted that she belonged here and we were supposed to take care of her.” He looked down at the spot where he’d been rubbing his pants as though surprised to notice he’d been doing it. “Her mom wasn’t well, and taking care of Layla and Megan took its toll. After she moved back to Gainesville, everything just got worse—miserable, really.”
Sadie was intent on the story, but noted that Eric had gotten on the interstate toward Miami. Miami was fifty miles away. They weren’t going all the way to Miami were they?
Eric continued. “The rage subsided in part because her doctor finally put her on antidepressants that mellowed things out for her, but they also made her even more flat. Living amid the apathy for everything and everyone was like slowly drowning. She never called Meg
an Sweetie Pie after the accident, never brushed her hair before bedtime—it’s like she didn’t know Megan was her daughter.”
“She feels nothing?” Sadie said, thinking back over the exchanges she’d had with her. Certainly Layla was withdrawn and unresponsive. “But she got really anxious when she saw the driver’s license; she insisted it wasn’t Megan and left the room.”
“She did?” Eric said, looking at her quickly, surprised. He immediately turned his attention back to the road. “Really?”
Sadie nodded. “I mean, she wasn’t crying or anything. She just said over and over that the photo wasn’t Megan. Then she left and waited for me outside.”
“I wish I’d been there to see that,” Eric said, shaking his head with regret and changing lanes. “I’d have thought the only thing she’d worry about was the bracelet.”
“Well, she asked about that, too,” Sadie said after a moment, disappointed to have to share bad news. “What’s so important about the bracelet?”
“Layla’s father gave it to her when she graduated from high school; he died about a year later from colon cancer,” Eric said. “After the accident, Layla’s mom worried Layla would lose it or break it, so we decided to take it from her. She didn’t notice it was gone, and I assumed she’d forgotten all about it, since a lot of her memories had been affected by the injury.
“When Megan turned sixteen, I gave the bracelet to her, as a kind of gift from Layla in a roundabout way. When Layla saw Megan wearing it, she got really upset and accused Megan of stealing. Meg thought she should give it back, but I wouldn’t let her. After that, Megan only wore it when she wasn’t around Layla, and when Megan disappeared, Layla was most upset because the police talked about how Megan was wearing the bracelet at the club that night. Layla kept saying that the bracelet was hers and she wanted it back. I’m assuming the police didn’t return the bracelet?”
“They said it was evidence,” Sadie explained.
Eric nodded. “Our daughter was missing, and yet Layla freaked out over a bracelet.” He sighed before continuing, “It was a very ugly day for me.”
Sadie could only imagine. “How did Megan handle Layla’s problems? It must have been hard for her to grow up with that.”
“For the most part she seemed to take Layla’s injury in stride, but I know it was hard for her. Layla hated affection, got easily frustrated, and in time, Megan seemed to close in on herself more and more. One day when Megan was almost ten, I came home and found her hiding in the closet. She’d broken something—I can’t remember what—and Layla had just lost it. There were broken dishes all over the kitchen, and she’d ripped the pages out of Megan’s baby book while calling Megan horrible names and telling her she was a bad girl over and over again. My little Sweetie Pie was shaking she was so scared of Layla hurting her, and she melted into sobs when I found her.” Eric voice was soft.
“That’s when I decided to leave. Until then I had thought keeping the family together would be good for Megan, but that day I realized it wasn’t anymore. I convinced Megan to go to a counselor, and for a little while it seemed to help, but it was expensive, and we were really struggling to make things work. At some point I just had to trust that she could rise above all this.” He paused and Sadie wondered if he were questioning that decision.
“As Megan got older, she reminded me of Layla in some ways—Layla after the accident, I mean. She wouldn’t share her feelings, wouldn’t react to things the way you’d expect someone too. It was like, because she had spent so many years trying to be inconspicuous, she didn’t know how to be . . . normal anymore. When she decided to go to Virginia for school, I was optimistic that she was going to make her own way in the world. Seven months later, she was gone.”
“How old was she when she disappeared?” Sadie asked.
“Twenty-two, but it was her first year of college, her first year living away from home. And she’d just broken up with her first boyfriend.” Sadie wondered if he was the boy in the picture she’d seen in the box. Eric kept talking. “She didn’t tell me that she and her roommate, Shay, were going to Key West for spring break. I thought she was staying in Richmond to catch up on some schoolwork. But, honestly, I’d have probably encouraged her to go just because it was the normal thing to do in college.” Sadie wasn’t so sure of that—she hadn’t partied in college, and it certainly hadn’t hurt her. He kept talking. “They’d gone to a club of some kind on Friday, and Megan left early. I don’t think she’d ever been to a bar in her life, so it was probably pretty overwhelming. She told Shay she was going back to the motel. No one saw her after that.”
“No one?” Sadie said.
Eric shook his head. “It was spring break, with thousands of college kids overrunning Key West. Megan had never been one to stand out. By the time Shay dared tell anyone, it had been two full days since she’d seen her. She said she’d kept waiting for Megan to show up, and she didn’t want to tell me or her parents for fear she’d get in trouble for going to Key West in the first place. Because of the delay, we lost precious time. The media didn’t cover the story for very long. Megan was too old to garner the same attention a teenager would get, and there was literally nothing to go on.”
“That’s so horrible,” Sadie said, realizing she’d learned more about Eric in the last five minutes than she had in the three months since she’d met him. She wished there was time to ask more questions—there was a kind of . . . abruptness to the way he told the story, but she was sure that was simply because he had to condense events.
“It has been horrible,” Eric said. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
Sadie looked at the freeway ahead of them while trying to think of what she could say next. It all looked so different from Colorado, with unbroken sky and almost as much tropical greenery as there were concrete buildings that rose up on every side.
“I assume the police investigated Shay and the boyfriend?” Sadie asked.
“Extensively,” Eric said with a nod. “In the beginning I was convinced they knew something, but they both agreed to take lie detector tests and passed with flying colors. I honestly believe they told us everything they knew.”
“But there have to be suspects,” Sadie said. Every murder she’d been involved with had suspects. Without someone to look at, there was nowhere to look for answers. “Someone with a secret, a motive that, even if you can’t prove it, is there and slowly unravels the more you pick at it.”
Eric shook his head.
“And there were no other clues?” Sadie said, still wanting suspects. “I mean, did it look like she’d taken anything with her? How much money did she have?”
Eric glanced at her quickly. “You mean, like she left on purpose?” There was no mistaking the edge in his voice. He continued before Sadie could answer. “That’s the police’s favorite theory too, that she was depressed and struggling and just moved on. She wouldn’t have done that. And no, she didn’t take anything with her—nothing.”
“Except the bracelet,” Sadie said quietly.
Chapter 20
Eric heard her anyway. He clenched his jaw. “The bracelet, her purse, and the clothes she was wearing,” he clarified, then leaned forward and grabbed the stack of papers he’d thrown on the dash, swerving slightly to the left. Sadie hurried to take the papers from him so he’d get back to driving in a straight line. “She had almost two thousand dollars in a bank account that hasn’t been touched.”
He nodded toward the papers in Sadie’s hands. “There’s a copy of the official police report in there,” he said. “Shay listed everything Megan was wearing, and the police did an extensive search of Megan’s apartment and car, which was in the motel parking lot.”
Sadie thumbed through the papers until she came to one that looked official, with Megan’s name broken into first, middle, and last name, followed by her physical description. Five foot two inches, a hundred and forty pounds, brown hair, blue eyes, no noticeable scars, tattoos, or piercings. She’d b
een wearing a green tank top, a denim skirt, and sandals, a hemp necklace with a shell on it, and one diamond tennis bracelet.
“Diamond?” Sadie questioned. “It was a diamond bracelet?”
“Kind of,” Eric said. “Cubic zirconium, but still pretty pricey.”
“Maybe someone thought it was real and tried to steal it,” Sadie suggested.
“The police worked that angle,” Eric said, “but it didn’t lead anywhere. Nothing showed up in pawn shops, and now we know why.”
Sadie thought about the body the police had found with the bracelet as she turned to another page. It was full of handwritten notes. She focused on one line. “‘Body moved’?” she read out loud.
Eric nodded. “The grave they found the . . . woman in yesterday was fresh; they’re pretty sure it was moved to that location, but it’s been buried somewhere else for awhile. They don’t know how long exactly, but things . . . break down pretty fast in Florida.”
Sadie nodded, not wanting to get into details. Thinking about decomposition while discussing Eric’s daughter—his Sweetie Pie—made her feel a little ill.
“Maybe Megan sold the bracelet,” Sadie said, leafing through the other papers but not finding anything of interest. “If she had left on her own, and not taken anything, she might have needed the money.”
Eric didn’t answer for a moment so she looked over at him to see him staring straight ahead. Oh yeah, he didn’t like the theory that Megan left on purpose.
“She didn’t say good-bye,” Eric said, his voice stubborn. “Not to me, or Larry, or Shay. If she had planned to leave, she’d have said something, or emptied her bank account, or taken something with her and, quite frankly, even at twenty-two, she struggled to simply get to class on time.”
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