by Regan, Lisa
“I’m not suggesting they aren’t. Trinity… we all know she’s ambitious… but Gram, she’s even more closed-off and isolated than I am.”
Lisette laughed. “I’m glad you realize that about yourself. Like I said, growth.”
“I’m serious, Gram. In all the time I’ve known her, Trinity’s never had a boyfriend. Never even dated anyone. Today I find out she was seeing an FBI agent for the last few months. She never even told me.”
“Maybe it’s not serious,” Lisette argued. “Maybe she didn’t want to start telling people until she knew it was going somewhere.”
“It’s not just that. Trinity literally has no friends. None. What kind of person has zero friends?”
Lisette reached across the table and covered Josie’s hands with one of her own. The warmth and familiarity of her grandmother’s touch soothed some of Josie’s frayed nerves. “She has you, Josie.”
Guilt from her last exchange with Trinity washed over her. “I don’t think I count as a friend.”
“Don’t you? It was your name she wrote on her door just before she was taken. That’s what Shannon and Christian told me.”
“Not my name,” Josie said. “She wrote Vanessa.”
“Because she was trying to tell you something, dear. Point you in a direction. It would have been far quicker to write Josie than Vanessa, wouldn’t it? There’s something she wants you to see, Josie. What does Trinity know about you?”
Josie swallowed, her mouth dry. “She knows how I take my coffee. She knows my favorite restaurant, what my house looks like, who all my friends are, my boyfriend. She knows my romantic history, mostly because she was there after Ray died and when Luke and I broke up—as a reporter, not as my sister. She knows that I have—that I’ve had—a drinking problem. She knows that I value my career…”
“She knows that you’re exceptional at what you do, Josie. She knows you’ll follow the trail. She knows you’ve solved cases before by following the most unlikely clues. She trusts you to find her.”
Josie fought to keep her voice from cracking. “I don’t think I can.”
“Nonsense. Think, Josie. Why Vanessa? What is she trying to tell you?”
Josie shook her head. “I don’t know. I really don’t, Gram.”
“What does the name Vanessa evoke, Josie?”
“I don’t know. The abduction? Our family? The past?”
“Which of those is most relevant here?” Lisette prodded.
“Gram, I don’t know. The abduction, I guess.”
“Because she was being abducted? Too easy. What else does the name Vanessa evoke?”
Josie felt like she was playing a game for which she didn’t even know the rules. “The past?”
“She’s pointing you in a direction, Josie. Toward the past. Probably quite far back.”
“But we didn’t even know each other far back in the past.”
Lisette frowned. Trying a different tack, she said, “Do you have inside jokes? I know you’ve only been officially sisters for three years now, but surely you’ve developed some ways of communicating with one another that are unique to the two of you. Lots of friends have a shorthand of sorts.”
“What did you say?”
“Shorthand,” Lisette repeated. “An abbreviated way of communicating with one another that only the two of you understand.”
“We don’t, but Gram, when I was small, before you took the job at the jewelry store, you were a secretary, weren’t you?”
Lisette’s eyes widened. She pulled her hand away from Josie and wrapped both palms around her coffee mug. “Josie, are you okay?”
Something had been niggling at the back of Josie’s mind since she, Gretchen, and Mettner had interviewed Jaime Pestrak. “This is important, Gram.”
“We’re talking about Trinity, dear.”
“I know. This is about Trinity. How many years did you work as a secretary?”
Lisette shrugged. “Oh, decades. I started while I was still in high school. That was back in the fifties.”
“Before computers,” Josie said.
Lisette laughed. “Before any technology, really, unless you count typewriters.”
“You used shorthand to take notes, didn’t you? To transcribe meetings?”
“Why yes, we did,” Lisette said. “It took weeks to learn it. There were two systems at the time: Gregg and Pitman. I learned Gregg. I used it all the way up until the late nineties. They still taught it in a lot of high schools then, too. The ones out here in rural Pennsylvania, at least. Then came lots of new technology. Shorthand went out of fashion.”
“Do you remember it?” Josie asked, a spiral of excitement shooting from her stomach straight to her head. She took out her phone and searched for the photo of Trinity’s door panel.
“I’m sure I do,” Lisette said. “I’m not sure how well I could write it with my arthritis, but I used it for forty years. I could probably remember it. I bet the library has a few books on it if I needed to refresh my skills. But Josie, what is this all about?”
Josie turned her phone toward Lisette. “Under the name. Is that shorthand?”
Lisette took the phone from Josie, holding it in both of her hands which now shook. She stared at the photo. “I believe it is. It sure looks like Gregg shorthand to me.”
Josie’s heart felt like it might spring right out of her chest. “What does it say? Can you read it?”
“It says, if I remember my shorthand, ‘read my day.’”
“Read my day?”
Lisette’s brow lifted. “That can’t be right, but I think it is. She must have misspelled or forgotten some letters.”
“Read my day,” Josie murmured.
“It could be dairy.”
“No,” Josie said. “Not day or dairy. Diary.”
Twenty-Four
“Shorthand?” Shannon said, eyes wide.
She stared across the conference room table at Josie and Lisette. Beside her, Christian reached over and rested a hand on her shoulder. He said, “Trinity learned shorthand from my mother when she was twelve years old.”
Shannon glanced at him. “Oh wait, I remember that now. It was when your mom got sick, wasn’t it?”
Josie didn’t know much about her biological grandparents. Shannon’s father had died of heart failure only three years before Josie found out about the Paynes, and her mother was in a skilled nursing facility for residents with advanced Alzheimer’s. Josie had met Shannon’s mother once, but the woman had no idea who her own daughter was, let alone the significance of Josie having been reunited with Shannon and her family. Both of Christian’s parents were deceased. His father had served as a marine in the Vietnam War and died in combat. His mother raised him on her own, working as a paralegal for a large law firm to support him and his younger sister. She had passed of cancer decades earlier.
Christian looked at Josie. “Your grandmother, my mom, she got lung cancer when Trinity was in the sixth grade. She moved in with us so we could care for her. They treated it as aggressively as they could, but the cancer was too advanced. The doctors gave her a year to live. She made it eighteen months. She and Trinity were very close, especially during the last year of her life.”
“I had no idea,” Josie croaked.
Shannon added, “Trinity used to come home from school and spend the entire afternoon and evening sitting in her room with her.”
Christian’s eyes shone with tears. “She was very devoted to her. I know it meant a lot to my mom.”
Beneath the table, Josie felt Lisette’s hand slip into hers and squeeze.
“Trinity didn’t want her to be alone,” Shannon said. “I mean, she wasn’t alone, we were there with her, but…”
Christian looked at his wife, whose eyes were now on the table. He cleared his throat. “Trinity had a hard time in school. Socially. Especially that year.”
Shannon met her husband’s eyes. “Your mother was her only friend during that time.”
Chri
stian pursed his lips and nodded. Turning back to Josie, he said, “They played cards and board games. Trinity would put on these little dance numbers for her to try to make her laugh. They watched television together. My mom taught her how to do her make-up.”
“And taught her shorthand,” Josie filled in.
Christian laughed. “It was their secret code. They used to leave little notes for one another that only they could understand.”
Josie felt a piercing ache in her chest. She knew how much a grandparent could mean to a young girl. If it hadn’t been for Lisette, Josie would never have survived her childhood. The woman who had posed as Josie’s mother had been cruel and abusive. Lisette had fought to get custody of Josie and had done everything in her power to protect her. The day Josie finally, permanently, went to live with Lisette had been one of the best days of her life. It had been a turning point. Lisette and Josie had also played cards and board games. Lisette had taken Josie on many adventures: sledding, roller skating, beach vacations, amusement parks, Broadway musicals, museums. Although they hadn’t had a literal secret code, they’d enjoyed certain rituals like picking each other wildflowers and leaving them in the vase in Lisette’s foyer for one another, belting out the U2 song ‘Beautiful Day’ together whenever it came on the radio, and going out for ice-cream whenever one of them had a particularly bad day—whipped cream and sprinkles were required. Josie couldn’t even imagine what might have happened to her if she had lost Lisette as a young girl. Emotionally, she had already been on precarious footing. That kind of devastation would have derailed her life entirely.
“Then your mom died,” Josie said softly to Christian. “And Trinity was alone.”
Shannon and Christian looked at one another again. Shannon reached up to where his hand rested on her shoulder and covered it with one of her own.
Lisette said, “That must have been devastating for her.”
Shannon nodded. “It was. She struggled badly for a long time.”
“We had to get her a therapist,” Christian agreed. “We even considered home-schooling her.”
Josie asked, “She was having trouble in school? With the other kids?”
“Yes,” Shannon said. “No matter how many times we met with the principal or threatened legal action against the other kids who messed with her, it just continued. It got worse after her grandmother passed.”
“It?” Josie said. “You mean bullying?”
Christian said, “Yes, she was bullied badly.”
It was hard for Josie to imagine. Trinity was one of the most savagely confident people she knew. She worked in an industry that daily put her under a microscope. Josie had seen some of the derisive and downright nasty comments on social media directed toward Trinity at times, criticizing anything and everything: her weight, her skin, her teeth, her hair, her clothes, her shoes, her laugh, the tone of her voice. There was no end to the demeaning and cruel online commentary. Yet, Trinity had always been flippant about it. Sometimes she even read comments out loud to Josie and laughed at them. “It’s just the nature of this business,” she would say when Josie got upset about what people had written. “I just focus on my fans, and I have a lot of wonderful fans.”
“She was bullied badly, but she went into a profession where every little thing about her would be under scrutiny and she would be subject to bullying and harassment on a daily basis,” Lisette observed, as if reading Josie’s mind. Under the table, she gave Josie’s hand another squeeze.
Shannon gave a little laugh. “I know. It always seemed strange to me, too. But it was kind of like her giving every person who ever bullied her the finger, wasn’t it? She becomes a journalist and ends up on the highest rated morning show in the country.”
“She met that reporter, though, remember?” Christian said.
“What reporter?” Josie asked. “Codie Lash?”
“No, that wasn’t her name,” Shannon said, “It was some local correspondent. Trinity was fourteen, I think. She found some… remains in the woods. Because it was such a small town, a reporter came to interview her. She was completely enamored of the woman. It was after that she decided to be a reporter.”
“Remains? Human remains?” Josie asked, trying to keep her voice level.
Shannon waved a hand dismissively. “It was the body of a hunter who had gone missing the year before, an older gentleman. It was very sad. He must have gotten lost because when Trinity found him, he was curled up around his rifle. His clothes were still in pretty good shape and his wallet and hunting license were there.”
No connection, Josie thought. “What was Trinity doing when she found him?” Josie asked.
“She was volunteering at a nature preserve at the time,” Shannon explained.
Christian laughed. “Volunteering? No, she was doing community service.”
“Hard to imagine Trinity volunteering for much,” Josie agreed. “Community service for what?”
“She got into a fight with a girl at school,” Christian said.
“No, not a girl from her school,” Shannon said. “It was someone from a different school.”
“Oh, right. Well, it’s not important. They both got in trouble. There were criminal charges brought against both of them, but our attorney made an out-of-court arrangement for her to do community service, and she had to go to therapy although she was already seeing a psychologist at that point because of everything else: losing my mom, the school stuff and—”
He broke off and his face went ashen.
“And what?” Josie said.
Christian looked at Shannon. “Vanessa,” he said.
Shannon’s hand flew to her chest. “Oh my God. I can’t believe I forgot.”
“Forgot what?” Josie asked.
Shannon shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “After your grandmother died, Trinity became kind of fixated on death.”
“Understandable,” Josie said. “She was so young.”
“But she became fixated on you,” Christian said.
“Me?”
“Well, not you, specifically because we thought you were dead, but the idea of you,” Shannon explained. “She kept asking questions about you although there wasn’t much to tell. You were only three weeks old when you were taken from us. Then she…”
Christian took over. “She started telling people she had a twin sister. She said you were away at boarding school. Sometimes she told people you were in a foreign exchange student program.”
“Oh God,” Josie said.
“That was one of the reasons we had to get her into therapy,” Shannon said. “But the therapist said it was her way of processing her grief and that we should let her work through it.”
“Did the therapist, by any chance, suggest she keep a diary?” Josie asked.
“Letters,” Shannon said. “She told Trinity to write letters to you.”
“Do you still have them?” Josie asked.
“We might,” Shannon said.
“We have a bunch of Trinity’s stuff in the attic,” Christian said. “She didn’t have room for it in New York City, but she didn’t want to part with it either.”
“I need you to go home and see if you can find those letters or any sort of diary she might have written at that time. I need you to do it as soon as possible,” Josie said.
“We’ll do it,” Shannon said. “But Josie, why on earth would Trinity want you to read a bunch of letters she wrote to you when she was in high school? What does that have to do with her going missing now?”
“I don’t know,” Josie said. “But it’s the only clue we’ve got. I have to see where it leads.”
Twenty-Five
Alex eavesdropped on his mother’s side of the phone call from the end of the hall. He watched as one of her bare feet tapped against the wooden floor. Her free arm was clutched against her stomach, swathed in a hard cast that ran from her hand to just below her elbow. When she hung up, a grin stretched wide across her face. She beckoned him to her and took on
e of his hands, twirling him around. “Dance with me!” she exclaimed. “I’ve just had the best news! Just wait until your father gets home.”
But Alex doubted that any news would make his father happy. Not after the latest incident. Once again, Alex had earnestly assured his mother that he had tried to stop Zandra before she knocked her off the back deck. But he hadn’t gotten there in time, and Zandra had let their mother scream for a very long time while she stared at the bone protruding from the skin of her forearm. Looking at Hanna now, he realized that the sight of her latest injury—of the sharp, jagged end of her bone—had made him feel like dancing. But he couldn’t tell anyone that. They wouldn’t understand.
Zandra was locked away again, and now Alex had to sleep out back in a shed his father had built—even in the freezing cold.
When Frances came home, Hanna told him how someone had bought almost her entire collection; how they wouldn’t need to worry about money for a very long time. Alex expected fury from his father for some reason, but he was jubilant. Happier than Alex had ever seen him. Hanna danced through the foyer with Frances that night as well. They had a bottle of wine and let Alex eat a second helping of dinner before Frances sent him out back for the night.
In the morning, Alex waited by the back door for his mother to wake up and let him inside. She sang as she cooked breakfast, sashaying around the kitchen in her bare feet. She served him bacon and eggs, and he shoveled it into his mouth. His father didn’t acknowledge him when he came into the kitchen. Instead, he went over to where Hanna stood by the stove, cupped her rear end with his hand and kissed her neck.
He sat across from Alex, and Hanna served him coffee. The spoon clinked around inside the mug. Frances said, “Hanna, you left a mess in the bedroom.”
His voice was low but taut, like a string about to snap. Hanna froze and turned slowly to him, a puzzled look on her face. “What?”
He drew each word out. “You. Left. A. Mess. In. The. Bedroom.”
“Oh, well, I’ll clean up after I make breakfast.”
Frances said, “Hopefully no one will trip and fall over the clothes you left on the floor before that.”
